
Ideas and execution – an enormous difference in effort - bigiain
http://iainchalmers.org/2012-12-ideas-and-execution-the-enourmous-difference-in-effort-between-them-internet
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frogurt
We just (as in, just finished this afternoon) had a whole 2 days of almost
exactly this -- realestate.com.au (REA group) has quarterly "hack days", where
we work, either independently or in spontaneous teams, on whatever we feel
like doing. Mostly, it's related to and guided by technical or product ideas
that would benefit the company.

However, what always, _always_ strikes me is that no matter the good idea, and
no matter how well thought out and planned it is, it's always going to need a
heap of work to make it move beyond the initial concept phase into something
that has half a hope of standing the whims and vagaries of a real production
environment, with real users.

Whatever project wins the day, gets company support to continue development --
and so far, months of solid work from extremely high-functioning and skilled
teams is what it's taken to get anything that can actually be deployed and
used consistently. There is no such thing as a quick win, even with a quick
good idea.

It all goes to show, hard work always wins in the end, and execution is more
often than not the downfall of so many otherwise great ideas.

The project written about in the linked article, which might _seem_ like a
simple piece of controllable hardware, will require months of significant time
and effort from many, many dedicated folks to reach reality as a
manufacturable product, but that's the same as almost anything that
successfully sees the light of day. TANSTAAFL, indeed.

The interesting thing about modern systems of involvement is that it's
entirely possible to assist a project along its way, without having to be a
marketing genius, technical whiz, or market playing venture capitalist. As we
see in our hack days, lots of little pushes can make more difference in some
cases than one big push.

~~~
viveka
At ABC Innovation, where I am at the moment, every day is like this. There is
a constant flurry of research, ideation, analysis - but the most important
part of all that is figuring out which approach, of all these, to put our
energy behind. Because the next part is a massive amount of hard work, with
dev, ops, design, project management, editorial people; the deployment of
serious resources. Which in the end is time spent away from our families, as
well as the unstinting attention of a lot of skilled people.

So damn right, the effort of making something real is huge. All the more
reason to be sure that you're working on a really good, important idea.

And yes, a lamp with a LAMP stack is a bloody great idea.
<http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloudlight/light-1>

Backed.

~~~
TheZenPsycho
As a fellow ABC co-worker, and platform dev on the light, Thank you.

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bigiain
I had another "ideas guy" pitch me last night, and I wrote him most of this in
an email, which when finished turned out to look like being worth a blog post.

This is for all those people who "just need a technical guy to code up my
idea!"

It doesn't work like that. It _especially_ doesn't work like that if your idea
is hardware…

~~~
sdoering
That is the reason, why I (being a product-guy at work) am learning to code.
The more scripts I write, the more I learn about the faulty thinking of "this
one should be easy".

It helps me to talk to the makers more clearly, more concise and more
realistically. But it differentiates me so far from other product guys (or my
uppers), as they do not understand, when I tell them, that their ideas might
not be so easy to implement, as they believe.

Makes being the "middleware" between product-management and makers much more
difficult, as I insist more and more on clear communicated specs, when I am
used as a translator for the other product-guys.

Execution is the real deal. There was a nice quote from Derek Sivers[1], that
ideas are just a multiplier for execution:

[1]: <http://sivers.org/multiply>

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mtgx
This is why I don't think the patent system should be so focused on ideas. It
should be a lot more focused on how much effort it takes to implement that
idea and actually make it work, and the time for which the patent is granted
(if granted at all) should be based on that. You shouldn't get 20 years
monopoly on a slide-to-unlock type of patent. But it may be reasonable to get
20 years for something that takes years of work and millions of dollars of
investment.

The current system seems to believe too much that "the more patents we have =
the more innovation we have". This has come right out of the US president's
mouth recently, and it was the same type of thinking for the unitary EU
patent, and why Putin also wants to do something similar in Russia. The focus
is entirely in the wrong direction.

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Swizec
I really like how this post evolves from bitching about not having enough time
to play, to being egged into playing with some hardware, into the ask for a
kickstarter project.

Well done!

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mpesce
Wow. Just amazing. Humble thanks.

