Dear Sanjeev Bansal,

An opportunity is a subjective interpretation of a certain business context defined by some key indicators or assumptions. For some people such a context can be interpreted as an opportunity, while for other can be interpreted as a threat. Thus, there is no objective method or mechanism by which everybody to decide if a given context or a new idea is an opportunity or a threat. The basic role is played in this situation by intuition, which represents a spin-off of experience. For instance, many investors refused in the initial phase to invest in the searching engine developed by the founders of Google just because they could see no opportunity of profit in the new idea. The same story can be told about the many investors who refused to invest in the idea of Howard Schultz to create Starbucks. My suggestion is to develop your own screening power in searching for opportunities and only then to look the best of them. I wish you good luck!

Dear Sir,

Thank you for asking! selecting the best opportunity requires understanding of yourself. to know your objectives in life is very important, and to know where you are in terms of achieving your objectives. you cannot choose any opportunity randomly, you will choose it based on your needs. if you have a business, you know why you have it and what you expect from your business. i think it's a matter of having goals and objectives.

Thanks

Sanjeev ji,

One way can be to first list your parameters like appeal of idea, resource requirement, your fit with respect to the idea, feasibility, etc and then have subpoints for these. You can assign some importance to these points like weights for them (between 1 to 5). Let's say you think Feasibility is very important then it will have weight of 5. Then give points against each for the different ideas and then do a weighted score for each idea and total the scores. Compare the scores and see which one is best.

We, humans are prone to give bias to one or few parameter and disregard others when we do this without a proper structure but this simple mathematical method helps keep a track of our assessment.

I hope this helps! Thanks you

What a great question. Did you know that Xerox actually developed the first personal computer -- but decided not to produce it or market it because they concluded that there would not be a market for it?

Harvard's Clayton M. Christensen, the world expert on disruptive innovation, suggests that the key determining factor in understanding value is the question, "What are customers trying to accomplish?" If an idea fits that question and adds value for current, potential new, and future customers, then that idea is worthy of pursuing and implementing.

The difficulty, of course, is in the implementation and execution of a great idea -- as emphasized by Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer. Execution is always the most difficult task!

CC

Thanks for your valuable replies.