A Trilogy On Entrepreneurship: Preparing for Entrepreneurship. Eduardo A. Morato Jr.

      Inside an enterprise, the entrepreneur may experience unexpected successes or failures. A variant of a product, a promo gimmick, a consigned item, or an allied service may suddenly be experiencing success. Behind this unexpected success is a secret that needs to be unlocked. Why was it not expected? What is driving the success? What attributes, features, characteristics or chance events are responsible for the success? Unexpected failures tell the opposite story. Something has gone wrong in the assumptions of the entrepreneur? What were those erroneous assumptions? How can the failures be turned around to achieve success?

      Opportunities from the Future

      Megatrending allows the entrepreneur to take a leap of faith into the future in order to exploit opportunities today. A systematic way of megatrending is to scan newspapers, books and journals for new rhetoric that seems to be uttered more and more often. Another way is to watch “futuristic” shows or read magazines on new technologies and innovations that are being experimented on. Still another way is to observe the behavior of teenagers because they will be the major customer group five to ten years into the future.

      Blue-skying, daydreaming and imagineering are creative methods of conjuring opportunities. The entrepreneur should put himself or herself in some future time period and imagine the way people live, behave and function in that futuristic world. Some weird ideas may pop out. No matter how absurd the idea is, try to extract a “grain of truth” from it. There is always a rational strain even in the most illogical idea because all ideas are founded on the totality of our real-life experiences and our highly functional environment. Surely, something cannot come out from purely nothing.