'Resources' in the sense used here include financial or physical or social or cultural capital, skills, talent, drive, insight, time space/geographies and other assets. 'First-order opportunities' refers to initial opportunities which, if seen and seized, lead to other opportunities. Thus, the opportunity to export oil (itself the result of successful exploration and the subsequent building of the requisite infrastructure and legal framework) avails the added opportunity to create wealth and jobs, and improve the general quality of life. Second-order opportunities are thus the added opportunities -- such as creating jobs, making a profit, enhancing community welfare, and being upwardly mobile.
Second-order opportunities may be, and indeed typically are, considered the "ultimate goals." And so be it. As I have said elsewhere, "You cannot have fruit if you don't grow fruit trees" -- unless, of course, someone gives or 'loses' or sells it to you, But what lies past the second order? That is, how are we to characterize third-order opportunities and those cascading beyond? The third-order, I would like to argue, is the beginning of self-creation and self-propagation; the beginning, in other words, of self-creating and self-replicating opportunities, and even resources.
That is the evolving idea I had in mind when I recently posed this crude CAT question to my Work and Industry class:
“When the ingenuity of well-educated or well-trained minds collides with the ‘hidden’ potentialities of an inter-connected world, the result is bound to be a wealth of self-creating jobs” Critically discuss this proposition, in terms of scholarly conversations about job-creation, wage-employment and self-employment.
All in all, then, an entrepreneur -- when truly successful (and sometimes/conceivably even in failure) -- is a catalyst for civilization's self-replication and evolution in any field of human endeavor, and in any of society's ecologies of presence.
Notes: 1. Inferences relevant to this conversation can be derived from this useful text: Click Here
2. You may also want to read this text, and check the references .
3. I find the imagery of the "sphinx" hexiamond to be an intriguing way to interrogate self-replication
Updated: May 22-23, 2013
