How do people recognise an opportunity that is worth pursuing?

How do people recognise an opportunity that is worth pursuing? This key question for entrepreneurs will be explored at the first Enterprise Tuesday session of the 2012/2013 series through a live example – Eight19 - the plastic solar technology University spin-out co-founded by Prof Sir Richard Friend.

A central question in entrepreneurship is: when and how do people recognise an opportunity that is worth pursuing? Should it be ideas that are evident in the market place based on alertness? Should it be about deep research that leads to ideas of how to disrupt markets? And when should we pursue them? Is it only when they offer watertight business cases or when they get us excited? In other words, what is the typical anatomy of an opportunity?

One of the more popular definitions of entrepreneurship is by Prof Howard Stevenson at Harvard Business School: “It is that an opportunity is pursued regardless of access to resources.” This may well apply to some opportunities but can it also apply to the translation of deep research into commercially viable products and services?

This question will be explored at the first Enterprise Tuesday session of the 2012/2013 series through a live example – Eight19

Enterprise Tuesday opens this year with the current “hot” company of Cambridge and the third start-up of Prof Sir Richard Friend (pictured), Cavendish Professor at the University of Cambridge. Eight19 has plastic solar technology that can revolutionize lives of people who are “off-grid”. The game changer is a printable plastic solar cell that is extremely affordable and scalable.

The evening’s speakers are members of a top team both in terms of scientific research and commercialisation. Professor Sir Richard Friend is co-presenting with Dr. Simon Bransfield Garth, CEO of Eight19 who has deep experience of taking disruptive technology to market and a PhD in Engineering from St Johns College. They will be joined by Dr Seena Rejal, who has a strong track record too including time at the Clinton Climate Initiative, and was Chairman of Cambridge University entrepreneurs when he was a PhD at Cambridge!

Interested? Please register at http://www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/enterprisetuesday/register.html

Registration is from 18:00. The lecture starts at 18:30 followed by networking from 20:00.

Enterprise Tuesday is a series of FREE evening lectures and networking sessions managed and delivered by the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL), based at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School.

www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk

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