Ideas Are Not Worth Nothing
A bad idea beautifully executed is worth nothing. Ideas are as important as execution and you usually need both, unless you are Einstein.
Civilization is build on ideas. I doubt Einstein could have put up a shelf, but he changed the word with thought experiments — ideas. The mantra that “an idea is worth nothing” is no less ridiculous than saying “execution is worth nothing”. As if it mattered more how well the theory of relativity was written than the idea itself.
As anyone who has worked as a professional creative knows, in reality, properly thought out ideas are not too much different from execution. Coming up with a creative idea on demand usually involves some form of process or plan and to say that this is not execution is to say that nobody at Apple is capable of execution because their products are created by other people in China.
Often people who don’t value ideas can’t see the difference between one that is the result of a well executed creative thought process, because they aren’t creative professionals, just as creatives sometimes don’t value the degree of imagination that goes into execution of plans based on those ideas.
Corporations and governments know the value of ideas and they protect knowledge and intellectual property vigorously, controlling leaks of information about new products to ‘delight and surprise’ people, as Apple do, when they roll them out. But still, in the world of startups the meme persists that ideas are worth nothing. This is convenient, if not deliberately propagated by the startup eco-system itself, by VC’s who rely on free information flow without NDAs. Other people (who don’t have experience of being paid to come up with ideas on demand) further endorse it to try and appear business savvy and avoid looking naive.
Ideas are easier to steal than execution, so if they aren’t protected or rewarded they would have a lower price that didn’t reflect their true cost of effort or value to competitors with the available funds to execute on them.
Copied ideas can have value because you are effectively removing innovation cost. But their value should be discounted if the idea isn’t complete or likely to last, in a relatively stable, unchanging market. The people that have copied them are less likely to be able to adapt the idea or improve it, having not been through the process or not necessarily having the resources that produced the ideas in the first place.
And then there are bad ideas — most ideas are bad. Often people can’t tell they are bad ideas and the outcome will be bad, because ideas come before execution. Ideas require imagination to visualize what they will look like after execution. People with less imagination, less creative people, are statistically less good at seeing the potential of ideas, and more likely to rank them alongside cheap-to-produce, bad ones, so are bound to value them less.
Nevertheless, if we are talking about a startup, not the theory of relativity, ideas are still worth nothing without execution by a team of people able to execute well. Ideas and execution are inexorably coupled.
To do great things you need a great idea AND great execution, but for more complex things, in between an idea AND its execution is a plan — and that is design.
Great idea AND great plan AND great execution are rare because it requires all three things to be exceptional and therefore of compounding rareness. For startup companies this is as rare as a proverbial unicorn sighting.
