Opportunity Recongition for Highly Profitable Projects in Large Corporations

Opportunity Recognition (OR) was studied in highly profitable platform and radical or discontinuous products developed in large billion dollar companies. Platform projects, which provides a whole new offering to the company and did not require high risk technologies, required a trigger event to get started, had a long gestation period and required senior management sponsorship. In contrast OR in discontinuous or radical highly profitable projects required superb highly inventive scientists who served as product champions and involved an element of fortuitous discovery. These results provide an initial glimpse into OR in large corporations, which has not been studied to the same depth as has occurred in OR in small businesses.