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The Value of An Idea is Just Doing It…

September 17, 2008 by admin

So says one enterprise marketing initiative.

But is it true?

My experience has taught me that

  • the idea is the easy bit
  • the vast majority of ‘ideas’ are poor and  should never be ‘done’
  • the best lesson we can teach a would be entrepreneur is to kiss a lot of frogs instead of falling in love with the first one that comes along

And most successful entrepreneurs that I know understand this.  They generate serial ideas and ‘test’ each of them against what they know – or can quickly find out about:

  • the industry
  • the market
  • their passion and commitment to the idea
  • the critical success factors (CSFs) relevant to the idea
  • their ability to develop a team that can deliver on the CSFs
  • the potential of the idea to deliver what they are looking for
    • a lifestyle niche business
    • a super scalable investment opportunity
    • a vehicle for social change and improvement

And unless an idea ‘stacks up’ against most of these headings they drop it and move on to the next idea.  If it does stack up then they might start to put together a team interested in working on the business plan.

In my experience the truth is that the value of most ideas is zero – or close to it.  In fact it is even worse than that – most ideas actually cost you time, money and relationships.

So in spite of pressures to create start-ups sometimes the best advice we can give to a potential entrepreneur is to just slow down consider their idea carefully against a set of sensible criteria and help them to understand that in time the right idea will come along.

Filed Under: enterprise, entrepreneurship Tagged With: business planning

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