This document discusses strategies for teaching entrepreneurship, specifically how to teach students to identify business opportunities. It presents research showing that opportunity identification is a fundamental entrepreneurial skill that can be developed. The document reviews several pedagogical approaches for teaching opportunity identification, including active and passive search methods, as well as techniques for teaching creative thinking skills like brainstorming, mind mapping, and visualization exercises. The overall goal is to provide teachers with theoretical frameworks and activities to help students learn how to discover new business opportunities.

1. faculty of entrepreneurshipTehran universityHandbook of research in entrepreneurship educationDr.arabionNafise taghaviMay 2010

2. Strategies for teaching entrepreneurshipA crucial emerging trend:Training students to identify and/or create business opportunities

3. Growing numbers of entrepreneurship researchers agree that entrepreneurship is basically concerned with the identification and development of business opportunities.

4. According to Shane and venkatarman (2000), the fundamental question asked by entrepreneurship research should be concerned whit, why , in what circumstance and how some people and not others are able to discover and exploit emerging opportunities within existing organization or by creating new, innovative firms.

5. Opportunities identification can therefore be described as fundamental entrepreneurship skill. Some authors have identified it as the very first step in the entrepreneurship process.

6. More recently Ardichvili et al. (2003) showed that opportunity identification leading to the creation of new businesses appears to be one of the most important skills of successful entrepreneurs.

7. Chandler and Jansen (1992) found that an entrepreneur namely entrepreneurial, managerial and technical – functional competencies. The most fundamental of these are the entrepreneurial competencies, which the authors describe as the ability to detect opportunities and select the most promising.A fundamental question : can opportunity identification be taught? Fiet believes teacher s can in fact help students to develop this particular entrepreneurial skill or competency .