Strategic Opportunity Management

Today we live in a world that is characterized by a constantly changing environment. During the last decade, this highly volatile environment forced companies to implement strategies that identify, track and minimise the risks that entrepreneurial activity entails. Unfortunately, risks only account for a part of the insecurity that is connected to future events. The other and not inferior part of this insecurity consists of possible positive developments – so called opportunities. Due to this reason in economic science and in practice the opinion aggravates that solely focusing on risks is not sufficient to fully exploit the potential ofmarkets and companies. In the 16th century, the Dutch Renaissance humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) said:“It is well known that among the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”Transferring this statement in the context of Risk Management, the conclusion becomes apparent: The environmental uncertainty that surrounds entrepreneurial actions includes both opportunities and threats. As commonly practiced though, Risk Management tools only address threats. While this approach is surely better than doing nothing, it still can be seen as a major weakness of the traditional Risk Management approach. Nevertheless, in terms of Erasmus, this approach represents the one-eyed man when compared with the blind. To continue this metaphor a little further, it is possible to conclude that the one-eyed king could be easily relieved of his crown by introducing an emperor who is able to see with two eyes. Although this problem is well known in economic science, up to know only little scientific focus was shifted towards the systematic identification and management of opportunities. In fact, most of the present literature focuses on the identification and handling of risk and even though much of the recently published literature captures the term opportunity, none of it proposes a solid idea of following up on the approach. Still, facing the defiances of the present economic environment, it is not sufficient for companies to focus their attention on reducing risks. Instead, it is imperative to deal with the subject of OpportunityManagement as well. With this paper, I want to undermine the importance of Opportunity Management for all companies independently of their size or branch that they operate in. Thereby, this paper is dedicated to all managers who strive to improve the professionalism of their companies in terms of strategic thinking. Furthermore, I hope that this paper can facilitate a practical implementation of a working Opportunity Management System.