Opportunity Identification and Its Role in the Entrepreneurial Classroom: A Pedagogical Approach and Empirical Test

Opportunity identification is emerging as an important content area in entrepreneurship education. We propose that opportunity identification is a competency that can be developed as are other unique competencies and that the entrepreneurship classroom is an appropriate venue for developing the skills necessary to improve the ability to identify opportunities. Using a variation of a Solomon Four Group Designed experiment, our results show that individuals can learn processes of opportunity identification and improve both the number of ideas generated and the innovativeness of those ideas. In addition, the results indicate that a predisposition toward innovation does not significantly alter the ability to learn processes of opportunity identification.