Looking For Opportunity
1. - I found my first economic opportunity from the following article:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/18/opinions/no-financial-stability-today-conway/
This article describes the transition in our job market that is making it more difficult for people to live financially stable lives from every day jobs. This is occurring for many reasons including reduced benefits, jobs being moved overseas, and the transition to a "shared" economy. I believe that the shared economy will continue to grow and become increasingly prevalent in the near future. As a result, I believe that there will be an increasing need for companies, websites or establishments that provide an established link between freelancer and job opportunity, therefore the prototypical customer would be freelance or gig workers.
I believe this is a relatively easy opportunity to exploit compared to most business opportunities since there are no tangible services or products provided; the product could simply be the website, which doesn't require much overhead maintenance compared to a typical brick and mortar type of business. These types of opportunities where a company is simply acting as a link between two markets are becoming more common as the shared economy grows. Uber is a great example of this type of model. Uber does not provide any real services or products that require inventory maintenance, etc. They use an app as a link between people who want to drive and people who need a ride. Airbnb is another great example.
This opportunity most likely stuck out to me because I happen to use services like Uber and Airbnb pretty often, and my job deals with selling on Amazon, which also has some aspects of the shared economy, so this aspect of the shared economy was already in my mind, so I am realizing now that there is going to be a greater need for companies/websites who can serve as a link between freelancers and those who need their services.
2. - My second economic opportunity also has to deal with the economic trend towards the shared/gig economy mentioned in the previous example. However, the previous opportunity was mostly for a website linking all kinds of freelancers and employers, but this opportunity is a more specific example of exploiting the gig economy.
I believe that there is a great opportunity for a company similar to Uber, but for yard work. For instance, you can create an app where people who are interested in providing yard work can apply and be approved and whenever they are free to do some yard work, they can log in to their app account just like Uber drivers and if someone in the area requests, then they can accept. I believe many young home-owners would be the best customers for this type of app, but it would be useful to anybody because they could quickly find someone to do lawn work, it would be cheaper than typical prices, and they would be able to see customer ratings and reviews for each worker.
Maybe the app could be called Momi, pronounced like "mow,"-"me." It's a short name and easy to remember, plus if they pronounce it like I just mentioned, then there is already a linguistic/psychological primer, so whenever a homeowner or home manager who has heard of the company thinks they need their lawn mowed, their mind will be much more likely to remember Momi.
I realized this opportunity is needed because when I was managing a home that was being rented out to other college students, finding lawn work was a pain sometimes, especially in the summer, so I often had to resort to people posting on Craigslist, but it does not provide any idea of what type of person will be showing up. However, this app would provide reviews, ratings and background checks when the service provider is first applying. I believe this would be a relatively easy app to create and manage.
3. - My first regulatory opportunity was found here:
http://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/regulatory/energy-regulatory-outlook.html
This article highlights some of the important regulatory trends occurring this year. One of which is an increasing need for cyber security in many businesses, including those in the energy sector. The article states that the CFTC recently approved regulations that will require companies to adhere to additional cyber security requirements. This will include additional security measures as well as routine services provided to test and evaluate the security of the companies' information. Therefore, there is an opportunity for companies to provide these additional cyber security measures or to provide the service of evaluating them. The prototypical customer is any company that stores sensitive information.
This opportunity could be very difficult to exploit depending on the level of expertise one has or acquires from others regarding cyber security. I most likely realized this opportunity because I was recently reading about the enormous cyber security breach that impacted Target in recent years.
4. - https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/finance/us-outlooks-top-regulatory-trends-for-2016-in-banking-reg.PDF
In this article, many regulatory trends are shown, including new regulations that will require financial institutions to more thoroughly measure risk. A big reason for these regulations is a move toward prevention of faulty loans, similar to the ones that led to the housing crisis in 2007-2009. There is an intrapreneurial opportunity for anyone already working within a financial institution to provide new measures of risk and alternative forms of risk analysis as well as an opportunity for any entrepreneur to provide these risk measurement services. This would be hard to exploit, but could be profitable.
I believe I noticed this opportunity because I recently watched the movie The Big Short, which is about the housing market and financial crisis caused by bad loans that were given due to poor risk assessment.
