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Introduction

8 九月, 2015 - 14:12

General Douglas MacArthur once said, “There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity”. An opportunity is simply an appropriate or favorable time or occasion. Alternatively it may be a situation or condition that is favorable for attainment of a goal. It might just be a good position to be in, a good chance, or a prospect. Opportunities abound in the network age, but many organizations are blinded to them because they seek security in environments that make them comfortable. They like dealing with familiar customers, and satisfying familiar needs with familiar offerings, and competing against easily recognizable rivals who do similar things that they do. Yet significant growth seldom comes from safe comfortable business environments – it usually comes from change. Business opportunities arise most often when customers don’t have a choice.

According the “theory of competitive rationality”, ideas developed by marketing professor Peter Dickson (1992), in most markets and industries there is a situation of over-supply, or simply, there is more capacity to produce the goods or services than there is a demand for them. There is more capacity to produce cars than there is a demand for them (witness the large number of cars on dealer lots), more capacity to produce life insurance than people who want it, and more capacity to produce clothes than there is a demand for them (as the stacked racks and shelves in clothing stores will attest to). Over-supply creates customer choice – without over-supply, customers have no alternatives. And how do customers behave when they are faced with choice? They exercise it. In doing so, they acquire information, they make all kinds of trade-offs, and they make decisions. In doing so, they learn, become smarter, and more sophisticated with regard to the particular product or service.

How do firms respond to sophisticated, smarter customers? They innovate – they try to offer customers something they haven’t seen before, something new, that will get their attention and hopefully their spending. But the problem with innovations is that competitors copy them, and that imitation leads to ……more oversupply. And so the cycle of competitive rationality keeps turning.

By now, some readers will have thought of current exceptions to the oversupply rule. There is no over-supply for example, of organs for transplantation. There is no over-supply of great works of art – Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh are deceased. There are many other situations where there is no over-supply, and of course this means that customers have no choice. Biotech firms are working hard to find answers to the organ donation problem, and museums strive to find solutions to the fact that lots of people want to see, appreciate and perhaps even own a great and famous picture. The point is simple: When customers don’t have a choice, smart entrepreneurs see opportunities.

The network age – the age of the Internet, cellular phones, digital media, satellites and GPS systems – is spinning off opportunities faster than almost any age in history. In this chapter we consider some fundamental forces that may serve as guideposts to entrepreneurs in identifying, at best, opportunities that might be identified, or at least, recognize potential threats to existing firms in business to customer markets.