Q James Fiet asserts that most entrepreneurs discover opportunity through chance. This isn’t very helpful in teaching entrepreneurship students to discover entrepreneurial opportunities. But in studying serial entrepreneurs (people who start business after business), it turns out that many of these successful entrepreneurs use a more directed approach to searching for opportunities worth pursuing. The following quotes and the exercise will help you find opportunities. This includes both finding the idea that can give rise to a new business, and finding innovations in an existing organization. Consider the following excerpts from respected management theorists: “There is a state of the world, which if we only knew it, would tell us what the consequences of every action are. But since we don’t know it we speak of uncertainty as being an uncertainty about the state of the world. What will actually happen will depend on the action we take but also depend on factors, which we don’t know” (Arrow, 1989). “Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstance of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others in that he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation. We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions and special circumstances” (Hayek, 1945). “The information needed to make [discoveries] does not exist in a concentrated or integrated form, but solely as dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge…. The entrepreneurial problem…is one of utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality” (Hayek, 1945). “Two individuals walk through the same city block teeming with hundreds of people in a variety of garbs, with shops of different kinds, advertising signs for many goods, buildings of different architectural styles. Each of these individuals will notice a different set of items out of these countless impressions impinging on the senses. What is noticed by one is not what is noticed by [another]. The difference can be ascribed, in part, to the interests and past experience of the two individuals. Each tends to notice what is of interest to him” (Kirzner, 1985).