Suggestions to find a business opportunity in a developing country
I've been looking out to find problems that I could solve for small business. I confess that as a graduate student I'm having a hard time discovering possible niches to work on. I feel like i'm on a desert, I can't come up with my own ideas but I don't know what small businesses need as I've been doing mostly distributed systems research, except for some time that I worked as a programmer on a legal firm developing internal systems. Entrepeneurship looks like some secret cult here.
Most discussions here on hacker news seems to be focused on consumer services; it seems hard to apply the advice given on those situations in an economic environment like Brazil, where legal requirements are complex, taxes are high, and there is lack of venture capital for funding.
Self-funded businesses targeting small business clients seem to have a greater chance of surviving. Sure it won't be the next twitter or facebook, but I'm more interested in having creative freedom and enough money to have a regular life (i.e. I don't need to own yatch).
With this context in mind, what would you suggest as a good approach to find business opportunities?