Are Ideas Really Worthless?
No. They’re not worthless. (Talk about getting to the point quickly eh?)
If ideas were worthless, entrepreneurs wouldn’t exist. And that doesn’t make much sense to me, at all.
Entrepreneurs by their very nature, take ideas and turn them into reality. They’re opportunity-seekers, coming up with ideas, validating them, and then turning them into businesses. Even those ideas that don’t go anywhere from a business perspective are still valuable to an entrepreneur. They’re at the very core of what an entrepreneur does.
How can ideas be worthless when every innovation, success story and product you love came from an idea?
Some great ideas never go anywhere because of poor execution. That’s absolutely true. It still doesn’t mean the idea itself was worthless. And some so-so ideas are huge success stories from a money-perspective; which might frustrate those people who had better ideas and couldn’t pull it off…but again, those so-so ideas were far from worthless.
When you talk about “worth” solely in terms of money, you’re narrowing the focus too much and losing the purpose and very spirit of ideas and those that generate them.
Entrepreneurs, in my book, are idea people. The best entrepreneurs combine active idea-generation with awesome execution for a winning combination. But even the best entrepreneurs fail on a regular basis … and that doesn’t diminish the worth of their ideas.
In the last week I’ve actively communicated with a few people about their ideas. One is an old friend who is looking for some help/advice in the web technologies world. Another emailed me out of the blue (thank you!), and I’m doing a lot of brainstorming on ideas for Grasshopper New Media. Where does this all lead?
From a business-perspective, I don’t know. Will my friend’s idea become a business? Will the ideas we’re floating for Grasshopper New Media become a reality? I’m not sure. But at the outset one of the real values of these ideas is networking.
Networking through ideas is powerful.
Ideas make it braindead easy to meet people. Someone brings you an idea and you connect them to someone else. Bam! Instant networking. In the reverse, you bring an idea to someone else, and they connect you to others. Your network expands.
We all know that networking is invaluable when it comes to growing a business. And it can start from ideas.
That’s a great way of looking at it, Ben. Ideas are like any raw material. By themselves, they might not have a lot of value. But put them in the hands of an artisan, in this case an entrepreneur, and you end up with a work of art.
Ideas are like raw materials … not a bad metaphor. Raw materials do have a lot of value for what they can be turned into, which equates nicely in my mind with the value of ideas.
Thanks for your comments Tony…