Opportunity Design: Understanding Entrepreneurial Opportunities Through Design Thinking

Entrepreneurship is about transforming novel ideas into future business, but it requires an entrepreneurial opportunity to be exploited via an effective strategic and organizational design. While the entrepreneurship literature says much about how to implement and organize new opportunities in a market setting (the back-end of entrepreneurial processes), it pays less attention to how entrepreneurs purposely design opportunities (the front-end of entrepreneurial processes). Drawing on methods and processes from the creative design literature, the paper introduces a framework of “opportunity design”. The framework explains how opportunities intentionally and pro-actively can be designed from methods and processes of moving-in and moving-out. An illustrative case of opportunity design within the area of sustainable energy and electric cars is presented to link the theoretical discussion to practice.