Introduction to Opportunities Topic 1

Overview

At its most basic level, an opportunity is based on a human need insufficiently addressed for a group of like-minded people. Specifically, you have an opportunity to help similar people better address one or more needs. Numerous “frameworks” exist to help entrepreneurs and corporate innovators navigate infinite opportunities. Many of the frameworks pretend to be in competition with each other and they have endless semantic battles, whereby they eschew their own stated principles in pursuit of winning. <sigh>

To be honest, I’m guilty, too. But I’m striving here to be agnostic and attempt to show where some of the more popular frameworks actually work together quite well based on the specific work that needs to be done in the moment. I will be talking about Agile, Customer Development, Design Thinking, Jobs-to-be-Done, and Lean Startup. If you’re playing startup buzzword bingo, you should be pretty close to BINGO!