How Enterprises Identify Market Opportunities: Research Results and Findings

Abstract

The paradigm of agile enterprise, which is aimed at the use of market opportunities, is increasingly used in practice. Therefore, it becomes important to provide businesses with the tools to help them identify opportunities appearing in the business environment. At least two general approaches to the identification of market opportunities can be distinguished. The first assumes that the market opportunities arise in the business environment and therefore need to be identified in it. For this purpose, methods of strategic analysis can be used which enable to recognize the changes appearing in the environment as well as methods of marketing research aimed at identification of needs and expectations of the customers. Assessment of ongoing changes in the environment from the view point of the objectives/ goals and business resources that are available (own and external resources) leads to the identification of opportunities which are the favorable situations for achieving the enterprise’s expectations. The second general approach assumes that the opportunities are created by the company, and therefore it depends on the entrepreneurial activities including the marketing of the product and probing whether the product is accepted. In this paper we focus only on methods of strategic analysis and marketing research as ways of identifying opportunities. We hypothesized that there are differences between the approaches to identifying opportunities and supporting them methods used by businesses small, medium and large sized. In order to verify this hypothesis, studies were carried out on a group of 150 firms. The results provide recommendations for enterprises, especially small and medium sized, how they can increase their ability to identify market opportunities and thereby improve their agility. This paper bases on data collected to prepare doctoral dissertation by Jowita Trzcielinska.