In search of entrepreneurial opportunities in digital economy

Abstract

Digital economy has been considered a dominantway to sustain economic growth in developed countries for recent years. However in this field there is a huge gap between technology accumulation and technology application, i.e. technology application far falling short of accumulation. It is this huge gap that creates a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities for Chinese firms. Generally speaking, technology applications firstly depend on discovery of social problems as well as design of their solutions, thus most of entrepreneurial opportunities are social-problem oriented in essence. The authors, taking these tendencies into account in this article, deeply analyze the definition, characteristics and identification of entrepreneurial opportunities in digital economy, compare US Apple Corporate and China Changhong Corporate, and stress necessity of shifting the focus of innovation from technology orientation to a social-problem one. So in the huge markets of China, social problems should always be aimed at first, and customer demands found second, and solutions designed third, and finally key resources integrated for development of these solutions. It is believed that in digital economy this social-problem oriented innovation process can provide more entrepreneurial opportunities as well as more innovative products and services for innovators to construct dominant application paradigms, so to win battles of new technology commercialization.