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633 : STEP ONE – SEEKING AND SHAPING OPPORTUNITIES

We saw in Chapter 1 how the hot wax team at Procter & Gamble
beavered away in an attempt to emulate a competitor product which in
practice did not work effectively. Albert Einstein declared that ‘the
formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution,
which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill’.44

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

This view is shared by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate
University and others, who contend that the ability to identify the key
problem or opportunity in a given situation, and then to recognise how
existing knowledge might be applied to it, is more important than
solving the problem. It could be argued, for example, that Crick and
Watson’s creative accomplishment in discovering DNA’s structure lay
not merely in the final model which they produced but also in the
recognition that DNA represented the correct problem towards which
they should direct their skills and efforts.

‘me-too’ heralds disaster A study of three decades of

enterprise policy in the Tees Valley published in 2004 highlighted the
danger of establishing businesses without clear differentiating benefit.
The study suggested that government efforts to stimulate new business
creation in the 1980s through start-up subsidy had the unintended
consequence of encouraging ‘me-too’ businesses which competed
purely on price. Having undercut the competition, but lacking
sustainable differentiation, these new businesses would in turn cease
trading. This churn phenomenon merely served to drive down prices in
the market rather than add to the total stock of value-adding
businesses.45

the power of the open mind Research supports the

effectiveness of an open approach which allows opportunities and ideas
to develop. Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tracked the
careers of a cohort of art students whose approach to a particular piece
of work they had observed.46 The students had been asked to select and