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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS62

explored and the business proposition was not defined. In their rush to
action, Mike Gooley and his colleagues were unable to identify what
specific problem in the market they were trying to address, let alone
what their business idea would represent. In addition, their research
had not identified the major impact which the political infrastructure
often has on businesses in third world countries.

give yourself time to develop alternatives It is

important that you give yourself the time to identify the correct market
opportunity to address before you rush to find a means of seizing the
opportunity, let alone implementing it.

Although creating alternative perspectives on the opportunity and
subsequently on the solution is such a critical part of the process, it is
one that is too often ignored.

rising above solutions ‘which will do’ The research study

on decision-making reported by Paul Nutt highlights just how
frequently managers search rapidly for solutions ‘which will do’ and
then move to immediate action. In 85 per cent of the decision-making
situations reviewed, there was little or no viable search for alternatives.
Instead, decision-makers tended to copy solutions followed by others,
accept off-the-shelf solutions from third parties or seize upon ideas of
unknown or debatable value and then search for evidence to support
them.

Even in the 15 per cent of cases where deliberate efforts were made to
develop viable alternatives, there was a tendency to stop the search for
alternatives once a few possibilities had been identified.43

identify the opportunity before the solution As we will

with Iridium see later on in the chapter, there is no point in an elegant
solution to a market opportunity which is based on incorrect
assumptions. The more alternative views of the opportunity which you
possess, the more you have challenged the assumptions underpinning
the opportunity, the greater the likelihood that the definition which you
eventually select will be sufficiently robust to allow you to produce
viable business ideas.

In many ways, identifying the correct opportunity to seize is as
important, if not more important, than creating the means of seizing it.