How do the Ideas “Whose Time Has Come” Look Like?
A rocket that could reach moon though imagined for centuries, couldn’t become a reality unless mankind found for it, materials that are light enough and yet could resist the abrasive friction of atmosphere. The rocket didn’t came into existence unless we could create engines that had reasonable weight and could reliably fire all through the journey with a limited amount of fuel. The time of idea of “rocket” came only when the dots underlying the idea became apparent enough to be connected to provide a workable shape.
This is true for any product that you have around you. Amazon couldn’t have happened in 1930s. In fact if a person would have claimed in 1930s that s/he wants to create a business in which people can shop for anything over a screen, the world would have considered that person on the other side of the thin line that divides ingenuity with lunacy. A software like excel couldn’t have been conceived unless it had an ‘ecosystem’ called an ‘operating system’ to support it. Nor would have an operating system like Windows seen the light of the day unless a hardware with appropriate processor and hard-disk came into existence!!
What is the point of this thought experiment? While reading about inventors who had brilliant ideas but couldn’t succeed in converting the technical feasibility of their ideas into commercially viable projects I pondered what all factors do play a role in creating a successful product? Obviously it is not always about the brilliance of an idea.
There are a few more factors. I could come up with four points that matter
1. The solution should be inherently more value adding than the existing one. Automobiles made horse carts obsolete because they were inherently more value adding than horse carts. A digital camera made film camera a history because it provided a better solution for the problem at hand.
2. The functional and technological ecosystem is developed enough. The digital camera could be made because the underlying technical ecosystem was ripe for it. We got digital cameras only after we had computers that could process images. Clayton Christensen has coined the term ‘value network’ for this ecosystem. Read his book “innovator’s dilemma” for getting a hang of the idea.
3. The people for whom it is meant are ready to use it and that too by paying a price that is more than its cost. Let me explain this with an example. Suppose I establish a big automobile company in a country in which people simply don’t know how to drive. Will I succeed in selling the product? I think no. I probably would be required to run driving classes along with my sales promotion to breakeven. Same is the case for the firms that say sell an accounting software to a customer base who don’t know how to operate it.
4. The regulatory environment is accommodating and prepared. The regulatory rules of the day play a very important role in survival of the ideas!! Many an ideas didn’t benefit their creators (rather they became reason of death of their creators — remember Galileo!!) because the regulatory regime of the day wasn’t in favour of the idea(and thus its time didn’t come)
I strongly feel that whether it is democracy or whether it is i-Phone, the survival of a product depends on these four points!!
Thus if you are an entrepreneur I strongly suggest that you gauge these four factors of your idea before embarking on it. You would be required to spend some of your energies behind these four factors along with inventing the product. (You would be probably meeting government officials to create charging stations for your electric car or might be required to train your clients to convince them that your product will reduce their costs). Take a stock of whether it is feasible to do this or you will run out of ammunition of your resources by the time you tame these four factors. So in simple words if you have a business idea that depends solely on teleporting humans, you better pass it on to next generation than pursuing it!!!!