Abstract:

Business knowledge bases are created for the purpose of preparing decisions at different levels of management: strategic, tactical and operational. The key area of interest in this article are strategic knowledge bases created for the discovery and creation of business opportunities. Opportunities are a specific conjunction of chances, company potential and business goals. Chances appear in the environment and are active for a certain period of time, regardless of whether they are exploited by the company. To take advantage of a chance, resources with the right potential (qualitative and quantitative structure) are needed. Identification of opportunities is done by assessing the possibility and sensibility of combining the chance and potential from the point of view of the company's business goals. The postulated knowledge base structure for opportunity discovery and creation includes : Macro- environment (economic, political and legal, social and demographic, technological, international), Microenvironment (competitive rivalry in the sector, bargaining power of customers in the sector, bargaining power of suppliers in the sector, treats of new entrants into the the sector, threat of substitute products or services), Company’s Potential (assets, liabilities, human resources,  knowledge, methods and techniques of management). An important research goal in this article is to search for the answer to the question: whether and to what extent companies create such bases, and how they use them. These questions are a part of a wider research project on Industry 4.0 and business opportunity theory, conducted at the Faculty of Engineering Management, Poznan University of Technology. The 2024-25 survey was conducted in Poland, covering 300 industrial enterprises in 19 industries, including 60 large enterprises and 240 medium-sized enterprises. The respondents were board members and managing directors of companies. There is a correlation between increased availability of data and information and contribute to accelerating entry into new sectors, new domestic markets and new foreign markets.