The search for opportunities

Welcome to the second topic of Identifying Opportunities!

In the previous topic, we focused on the perception of opportunities and explored what makes something an opportunity for innovation. We’ll now be focusing on where opportunities come from. There are many sources and methods of revealing an opportunity’s origin, some of which we will cover on this page. We’ll focus on obvious and subjective identification of opportunities, in combination with the timing of the opportunity.

So let’s get started!

We are always surrounded by opportunities. In fact, if you are in the right mindset you might feel overwhelmed by the number of opportunities available. However, not all of these are opportunities to innovate. They might just be an opportunity for personal gain, to profit, or to create a new product, service or business that will be successful, but isn’t actually innovative. Don’t be disheartened though, there are still plenty of opportunities for innovation.

Our world is constantly changing and improving because of innovation. Old problems are being solved and new ones are constantly emerging. Sometimes innovations are themselves triggering new problems and opportunities. For instance, who imagined a need for a smartphone screen repair service prior to the existence of smartphones?

We are always surrounded by opportunities to innovate, however, it’s up to us to find them and recognise them as opportunities. So, how do we do this?

The identification of an opportunity for innovation is dependent on someone deciding that a certain set of circumstances and their own competitive advantage offers them an opportunity to be innovative. Evaluating whether you are the right person at the right time with the right resources for a perceived opportunity is something you will learn more about in the next topic.

So where do innovative opportunities actually come from?

These opportunities can come from anywhere, more sources than we could ever cover. We’ve already spoken about problems as one source of opportunities. But where do these problems come from and are there other ways we can identify opportunities?

In this topic we’ll be looking at different tools you can use to identify opportunities. Within each tool there are different sources of opportunities and different methods you can use. Once you have figured out what tools are going to work for you, you can do further research to find out more.