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Assessing Business Opportunities
Abstract
Business development is crucial for sustained economic progress and individual well‐being.
This paper describes how to provide support for business development efforts in communities
in conflict environments or only recently emerged from conflict environments. It uses the
Cascade Approach® to provide a clear and practical framework for developing businesses that
are carefully and deliberately discovered by people who are passionate about them and are
capable of marshaling the requisite resources to transform ideas into exploitable value.
The author is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Kansas State
University. He may be reached by telephone at (785) 532‐3520 and by email at
vincent@ksu.edu.
There are worksheets accompanying this paper and they are available at www.Agmanager.info.
Contents
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 1
Research Problem and Paper Outline ......................................................................................... 1
PART I: PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK ........................................................................................... 3
The Geography of Economic Thought ........................................................................................ 3
Our Assumptions Are Not Necessarily Universal ........................................................................ 4
Establishing the Purpose for Action ............................................................................................ 6
PART II: OPPORTUNITY DISCOVERY AND ASSESSMENT.................................................................. 8
Defining the Person Searching for Opportunities ....................................................................... 8
The Conscious Search for Opportunities .................................................................................... 9
Assessment of Identified Opportunities ................................................................................... 11
Transforming Opportunities into Exploitable Value ................................................................. 12
Marshaling of Strategic Resources ........................................................................................... 16
Assigning Responsibilities ......................................................................................................... 18
PART III: FROM STRATEGIC THINKING TO STRATEGIC ACTION .................................................... 19
There Are No Islands ................................................................................................................. 19
Executing the Ideas ................................................................................................................... 20
There Are No Linearities, Expect Breakdowns .......................................................................... 22
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 23
REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................. 24
1
Practical Strategies for Business Development in
Conflict and Post‐Conflict Environments
Vincent Amanor‐Boadu
August 2009
INTRODUCTION
Conflicts can have adverse effects on people’s decision‐making capacity
and influence their relationships. This is because conflicts affect the
sensemaking that people bring to events and situations. Entrepreneurial
actions are based on creativity. They are driven by a way of thinking and
seeing that presents valuable opportunities which may be exploited for
the value they present. Given that entrepreneurs in conflict and post‐
conflict environments can be affected immeasurably by the subtle and
not‐so‐subtle events that define and characterize their experiences, their
ability to see opportunities and assess them is frequently affected by
these events. Thus, working in conflict or post‐conflict environments can
arduous because one has to negotiate one’s own sensemaking processes
as well navigate those of the people with whom one is working.
Despite these challenges, the work can be very rewarding if those
working on business development in these environments can develop the
right appreciation of the fundamentals of entrepreneurial business
development and understanding resource availability and constraints.
Their efforts can yield some positive effects if they can understand their
entrepreneurs’ capabilities and their capacities to overcome these
constraints as well as their audacity to drive towards their defined
objectives. These fruitful outcomes were observed in Japan and Europe
after the Second World War, when U.S. economic support under the
Marshall Plan helped leverage the inherent capabilities of Europeans and
Japanese to overcome the scourge of that conflict.
Research Problem and Paper Outline
This paper is framed to guide people working with nascent entrepreneurs
in conflict or post‐conflict environments embark on business
development initiatives. It focuses on the strategic aspects of business
development—opportunity discovery and assessment, resource
marshaling and execution of strategic plans. The tactical issues related to
business formation and marketing of products and services are treated
under a different title. Besides, the strategic issues discussed here are
less culture and location‐dependent than the tactical issues, allowing us
to discuss them in more generic terms. The paper’s overall objective,
2
then, is to provide the strategic processes that may be used to help with
business start‐ups and entrepreneurial renewal in conflict and post‐
conflict environments.
The people in conflict and post‐conflict environments are generally
different from the people who offer help and support that go beyond
culture. As Richard Nesbitt observed in his book The Geography of
Thought, these differences are embedded in the way people are
conditioned to “see” and interpret what they see. The tools for
seeing and interpreting are thought and language. Therefore,
the paper is divided into two principal parts. The first part
provides the philosophical framework for enhancing our
geography of thought capacity to facilitate business
development. It encompasses the development of a shared
seeing and a common language to communicate the thoughts
emanating from what is seen. Following that, I make the case
for clarity and completeness in the definition of the objectives
or the things that the business initiative seeks to achieve.
Stephen Covey defines this as “first things first” in his highly popular
bestseller, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
The second part of the paper uses the foregoing philosophical framework
to lay out a process for embarking on entrepreneurship‐driven business
development. The process presented here is based on the Cascade
Approach® I have developed and have been using with various
organizations for the past 15 years. The process involves the crafting of a
strategic direction for the business initiative—encompassing a vision,
mission and core value—and the development of an operations plan to
achieve the vision. We define the business’ objectives within the context
of specific business initiatives, developing a process for scoping for
opportunities and crafting strategies for translating the selected
objectives into exploitable value. The execution of the resulting plan
depends on resources and this is presented and discussed in the final
section of the paper.
The foundational philosophy of the strategic processes presented in this
paper is the metaphor of the river’s ultimate purpose: the desire to
empty itself into a larger body of water. The river’s commitment to this
purpose is such that it cannot be stopped regardless the size and might of
the obstacles in its path. It may be slowed down, but in the end, it
always achieves its purpose. This thought is reflected by Margaret
Wheatley in her book Leadership and the New Science. This metaphor is
appealing because the river exhibits the primary characteristics of
successful entrepreneurial business developers: tenacity, commitment
and passion.
3
PART I: PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK
The Geography of Economic Thought
Many years ago, I was a graduate student in Nigeria, working on the
economics of small farmer agriculture. My major professor, a respected
Nigerian production economist, invited me to accompany him to a
seminar at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) one
afternoon. The seminar was on the price response of Senegalese rice
farmers and was being presented by a visiting World Bank economist.
The essence of the presenter’s story was that an increase in rice price led
to a decrease in rice supply. He concluded from this that the African
small farmer is irrational because supply should increase with price
increases.
The room, filled with many of my professors, was very quiet after the
visiting economist completed his presentation. I could not understand
their silence because there was, obviously, something drastically wrong
with the irrationality conclusion. I knew this because I have lived with
some of these small farmers. But beyond my individual anecdotal
evidence, my master’s thesis was showing similar results—a negative
supply response—but I could not believe irrationality was a reasonable
explanation.1 I think my old professor invited me because he thought the
seminar will help me.
I asked the presenter what was measured as the farmers’ response to
price. “Did you measure production, acreage, marketed surplus or did all
of these return the same sign on price?” I asked.
After a little discussion, it became obvious that the measured response
variable was marketed surplus. That is, they measured how much the
farmers offered for sale, and not how much they produced.
“African small farmers will sell less of their total production when price
goes up and vice versa,” I heard my professor say something to that
effect. This is because African small farmers have a constant demand for
money—just enough to meet their purchase needs (school uniforms and
fees, books, salt, fish, etc. The negative sign on price was not due to
irrationality of the African small farmer at all, but to the capturing of the
wrong response metric to price.
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