Human intelligence vs Artificial intelligence in opportunity discovery

Opportunity is a core phenomenon in theories of: strategic management, entrepreneurship and agile enterprise. Usually it is meant as an external situation which favours the enterprise achieving its objectives and goals with accessible resources. Strategists and entrepreneurs search for opportunities to improve the firm’s performance. Some of them do this intuitively when others apply methods of strategic analysis and/or conduct marketing research. The Artificial intelligence particular cognitive computing creates new possibilities to discover opportunities. The aim of this paper is to present a general model of opportunity recognition that applies to all above mentioned approaches. Basing on this model a review of traditional methods of opportunity discovery, exploiting mostly human intelligence, is presented. Next a generic model of Artificial Intelligence aided opportunity discovery is discussed. The article also shows the results of a study of companies' use of traditional opportunity discovery methods and preliminary results of a study of opportunity discovery using artificial intelligence.