Opportunity Discovery Through Network Analysis

Discovering opportunities, defined as situations that can be exploited obtaining from them valuable outcomes, is the main task of entrepreneurs. In this paper we present a formalization of the process of discovering opportunities in a network of research organizations; we introduce opportunity networks constituted by a network modeled as a directed attributed multigraph, an opportunity exploiter, a set of opportunity patterns and opportunity ranking functions. We show how the discovery of joint-research collaborations opportunities in a research-oriented network can be formulated in terms of the proposed formalism.