ENTREPRENEURS
GREAT IDEAS
Great ideas are worthless until someone has successfully
implemented them. It is here that companies succeed or fail.
How should you move forward to deliver your ideas?
When Microsoft announced in 1983
that it would be releasing its Windows
1.0 software, it was before many of
us had ever heard of a PC, let alone
glimpsed a user interface. The rest, of
course, is history.
But it is rarely remembered that
it took Microsoft a full two years to
bring the product to market, that rival
VisiCorp actually beat it to the stores
with a windowing interface guided by
a mouse – and that in those heady, early
days of the digital revolution a further
three providers offering programs
using screen “windows” nearly edged
Microsoft out.
The fact that it is Microsoft we know
and love today is because they were the
most successful in implementing their
innovation. It has nothing to do with
them being first or having the most
original idea.
The recorded history of Microsoft’s
close shave, and the complex array of
factors that enabled it to steal a march on
its rivals, shows that the tech company’s
success was as much down to the
approach rivals took to implementation
as to any particular genius on the part
of Microsoft itself.
The moral of this tale? Ideas in
themselves are worth little.
If implementation is poor, brilliant
ideas that offer first-mover
advantage can be squandered and
originality becomes meaningless.
For the entrepreneur the challenge,
then, is not coming up with killer ideas
but coming up with effective ways to
implement them – that is, to translate
brilliant ideas into products and services
in a way that achieves customers before
the money runs out.
From the outset, moving from idea to
action requires them to confront
common myths:
Ivory tower
syndrome
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good ideas. We convince ourselves
that ours are somehow more original,
innovative and, well, special, as much
out of vanity as anything else.
Someone might steal
my idea
All too often innovators keep their ideas
close to their chests, fearing that if they
reveal them to someone else they will
be stolen. But feedback will enhance an
idea, and it is essential from the earliest
stages to share it with others in order to
gain validation and find mentors. The
truth is, people may like your idea, but
won’t want to shoulder the burden of
implementing it. If you minimise the
risk to your intellectual property by only
sharing your idea with a select band of
people whom you trust, you can sleep
easy.
Once these myths have been
confronted, a leap of faith is then
required to initiate implementation.
Some lively minds will, of course,
relish the ideas phase itself – it can
be very easy to lose oneself in an
endless thought-process in the
search for an optimal solution
to a problem. It is therefore
important to move as fast as possible
to implementation by side-lining
the fear of failure and of making
mistakes.
The real test of innovation – and the
only way the contribution it makes
to our shared prosperity can ever be
measured – is the extent to which
ideas are brought to fruition.
Many creative
people shar e a
belief that “I’m
the creative
genius, it’s up
to others to
implement
my dazzling
ideas”. It
is hard
to identify
where this
attitude originates,
but recognising it
can overcome a key
psychological obstacle to
progress. One way to do that
is to admit that originality is
greatly overstated – in fact,
most people have
In the early days: Mic
rosoft's Bill Gates
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