From idea to opportunity

A lot of good ideas are, well, good ideas, but not opportunities. I went yesterday to an international event about technology transfer hosted by ACC10-COPCA-CIDEM, excellent event by the way, and someone from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T) really described the process of identifying opportunities in a very appealing manner. He recommended entrepreneurs to ask themselves four questions:

(1) Who needs this and why?

(2) What attributes are important? (meaning, how should the product or service that I am willing to bring to the marketplace be to become really useful?)

(3) What are the economics?

(4) What will investors need to see in order to get interested?

These four questions can probably be answered in one hour if the entrepreneur really knows what he/she wants to do, and the answers are crucial to define the magnitude of the opportunity.