Faculty: Business and Law
Unit Name: Entrepreneurship and Venture Creation
Unit Code: BUS3025M-1213
Tutor’s Name: Kevin Blanchard
Work Title:
Date of Hand-in: 24.04.13
Words Number: /3000

Student’s Name: Rui Mauro Cardoso Alves
Enrolment Number: 09148618
Programme: BA (Hons) International Business

1-Introduce Business Idea
Our business idea is named Uni-Market. Uni-Market LTD is a new, recycling utility for students. Combining an online presence with a drop shop stall on campus means Uni-Market is highly convenient for its customers. Due to the renewable process of the service, Uni-Market can offer a product range at 'better than market' prices.
Uni-Market is the website where students can buy, sell or trade university related items. A stall will be situated on campus during the start of each academic year for students to quickly find cheap items or get instant cash for old ones. Landlords and local businesses will also have the option to advertise on our webpage.
Our primary target audience is undergraduate and postgraduate students between 18 and 25 years of age. The stall will be most beneficial for international students and students who arrive for their first semester at university. The website on the other hand, will be equally beneficial to all students.
There is a gap in the market for a local, fast and easy way to sell and buy used belongings, primarily for university students. There is no local site or way to easily dispose of unwanted belongings at the end of the academic year, and nowhere to quickly and easily buy things at a reasonable price when arriving to Lincoln. There is also a gap in simplifying the move to and from Lincoln for international students due to the fact that major second hand market websites only allow credit cards from the United Kingdom.
We have found that students tend to find themselves with a lot of unwanted items at the end of the academic year and due to the stress during the exam periods in May, they have not had time to look up a way to sell the items and end up throwing a lot of valuable books and belongings away or storing them at a high price. We therefore want to take opportunity of this market gap and offer a valuable service, both for the students and as a way of making fair profits.

1- Explain merits of the opportunity (and why other opportunities were rejected) * Entrepreneurial? * Opportunity recognition theories used – useful?

Useful Theories Used by me
According to Cantillon, he recognises that discrepancies between demand and supply in the market create opportunities for buying cheaply and selling at higher price and this sort of thesis would bring equilibrium to the market (Cantillon, D., 1755).
The level of entrepreneurial risk is also discussed as another characteristic of entrepreneurship by Frank Knight’s. He adopts the theory of early economists such as Richard Cantillon and J B Say, and added the dimension of risk-taking.
This theory considers uncertainty as a factor of production, and holds the main function of the entrepreneur as acting in anticipation of future events. The entrepreneur earns profit as a reward for taking such risks (Knight, F., 1921).

Israel Kirzner says that anyone can be an entrepreneur that there are no barriers to perception, what matters is noticing an opportunity he says that a competitive threat can emerge from anywhere and outsiders may be quicker to recognise opportunities. he considers the alertness to recognise opportunity more characteristic than innovation in defining entrepreneurship, no notion of risk within his theory, his theory model holds that the entrepreneur subconsciously discovering an opportunity to earn money by buying resources or producing a good, and selling it, Entrepreneur using the funds for his entrepreneurial venture, and Entrepreneur paying back the capitalist, including interest, and retaining the "pure entrepreneurial profit” (Kirzner, I. 1973).
McClelland hold