Taghavi (2)
- 1. A crucial emerging trend:Training students to identify and/or create business opportunitiesDr.arabionNafise taghavi
- 2. Growing numbers of entrepreneurship researchers agree that entrepreneurship is basically concerned with the identification and development of business opportunities.
- 3. According to Shane and venkatarman (2000), the fundamental question asked by entrepreneurship research should be concerned whit, why , in what circumstance and how some people and not others are able to discover and exploit emerging opportunities within existing organization or by creating new, innovative firms.
- 4. Opportunities identification can therefore be described as fundamental entrepreneurship skill. Some authors have identified it as the very first step in the entrepreneurship process.
- 5. More recently Ardichvili et al. (2003) showed that opportunity identification leading to the creation of new businesses appears to be one of the most important skills of successful entrepreneurs.
- 6. Chandler and Jansen (1992) found that an entrepreneur namely entrepreneurial, managerial and technical – functional competencies. The most fundamental of these are the entrepreneurial competencies, which the authors describe as the ability to detect opportunities and select the most promising.A fundamental question : can opportunity identification be taught? Fiet believes teacher s can in fact help students to develop this particular entrepreneurial skill or competency .
- 7. To support teachers who wish to do this, he propose a theoretical perspective that he believes render opportunity identification not only feasible but also, and especially, teachable, in that the teacher can introduce exercises and activities directly related to the theories in question DeTienne and Chandler (2004) showed that opportunity identification is a competency that can be developed just like any other competency, they found that the literature propose four opportunity identification methods: Active searchPassive searchFortuitous discoveryCreation of opportunities. Their pedagogical approach is based mainly on a vision of passive search, through which creativity is seen as a major, learnable skill.Some pedagogical proposals for teaching creative thinking Entrepreneurship is associated whit innovation and particularly with the identification or discovery of business opportunities. It is therefore necessary to teach students to seek out productive business idea.
- 8. Gundry and Kickul (1996) propose that students be taught to use a certain number of creativity techniques, and suggest conceptual creative methods such as mind-mapping. Divergent thinking, brainstorming, lateral thinking, metaphorical techniques and split-brain comparison. They also propose behaviour – cantered methods such as board games, music-making, drawing and visualization ( picture simulation)