Watching my favourite youtube clip of the month, and some recent conversations I’ve had with regards idea pitching, led me to ask the following simple question;

Is the great idea most important, or the ability to execute?

I’ve always contended that a mediocre idea with the ability to execute well will always beat the “game changer” with no hope of execution.

The calculation changes however when we’re looking at opportunities for well funded and resourced existing businesses (some of whom I’ve been talking with/about/to/at recently). These businesses have the ability to do pretty much anything, so their criteria needs to come down to what idea is the right one to do.

So we see there are two distinct types of business –

  • the boot strapped one that needs to get the product to market, can’t wait ad infinitum to create the killer app but needs to execute whatever they’re able to (and of course there needs to be some degree of validity for the concept otherwise they’re wasting their own time)
  • the cash happy one who can do whatever and needs some way of evaluating a plethora of opportunities to find the best choices

More and more it will become difficult to ideate the “game changing concept” and I wonder if this won’t, in time, lead to even more a situation of large enterprises acquiring good minds and creating concepts, thus shutting the boot strappers out of the equation.

I certainty hope not and would like to think there are lots of good ideas left to execute that are sufficiently below the radar of big business to allow the small fry to achieve them. The world would be a sadder place without little start-ups.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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