Opportunity Discovery Conference in St. Louis

2 May 2007 at 11:27 am Nicolai Foss 1 comment

| Nicolai Foss |

The past two days, three of the four O&M bloggers (Steve, Peter, and I) participated in a Washington University conference on opportunity discovery. Opportunity discovery is (in my interpretation) the outcome of actions initiated by individuals or teams directed at identifying hitherto neglected market needs and wants. Needless to say, OD is fundamentally what entrepreneurship is about. (Here are earlier O&M posts on eship).

The conference was a small gathering with the participation of about twenty-five people from entrepreneurship, strategic management, sociology, organizational behavior, psychology, and marketing (it included Jay Barney, Rich Makadok, Todd Zenger, Anne Marie Knott, David Meyer, and others). One possible interpretation is that scholars from diverse fields consider the entry barriers to the eship field to be low. Perhaps they are. . . .

Anyway, the conference was organized by WashU Professor Jackson Nickerson as an “emergent” event, meaning no formal paper presentations, but rather brief position statements on the meaning and antecedents and consequences of opportunity discovery, and intensive subsequent discussion. The seemingly chaotic design turned out to be surprisingly effective in alerting people from various disciplines to their respective positions — itself suggesting a lesson about the organization of academic opportunity discovery.

Here are some of the things I found noteworthy:

Whereas the traditional economics literature on eship (e.g., Schumpeter, Knight, Kirzner) typically portrays OD as discrete, isolated events, OD may in actuality be an outcome of interaction in communities of practice and knowledge communities. Brown University sociology professor David Meyer gave a very interesting illustration of this drawing on his work on networks of financiers.
OD is seldom (if ever) a revolutionary event, in the sense of the discovery being made separately from earlier insights, contributions and discoveries. On the contrary, most ODs, including those with massive implications for welfare, are in actuality quite incremental in terms of building on earlier inventions, knowledge, insights, etc. This came out clearly in the presentation by WashU psychology professor David Sawyer.
Empirical work on OD, at least in management, must necessarily make use of numerous latent constructs. Thus, “knowledge”, “learning”, and perhaps “opportunity discovery” are inherently latent, as O&M’s Peter Klein repeatedly pointed out.