CHAPTER 3Opportunities
At some point in your life you had an entrepreneurial epiphany. You suddenly came up with an idea that you couldn’t stop thinking about. You might have believed it was an idea that could change the world and bring you fame and fortune. It might be something that you wanted to create to solve a problem you had, or it could have been something you were completely fascinated by and obsessed with.
Throughout history, whenever there is a problem or an unmet need, humans have tried to create something to provide a solution. The academic literature talks about these unmet needs as being the result of “suboptimal solutions,” a status quo that leaves the user or customer unsatisfied. The telegraph was invented to address the fact that the postal service was a suboptimal solution for rapid communication and addressed the unmet need of instant communication over large distances. Airplanes provided a solution to suboptimal long voyages by ship. Facebook aggregated and improved on several different suboptimal solutions for sharing information with your friends and family.
The Four Criteria for an Opportunity
All opportunities start with an idea. While ideas are at the heart of all opportunities, for an idea to be an opportunity, it must be actionable (i.e., an idea that can’t be executed isn’t an opportunity) and have the following characteristics:1
- The idea is durable: It is not a fad and will last long enough to allow it to be monetized.
- The idea is timely:
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