This is a reaction to my current frustration. My ex-partner said ideas are only worth 2%, technology 5% and implementation 93%. But he wants to know if he take the idea and continue to work on it on his own.
So I said "If ideas are so cheap, why don't you think of a better one?" <crickets>
It's getting to the point where people say it without thinking.
"Ideas are worthless" means that having some idea about how to make some money is cheap and worthless. It has to be instantiated quite laboriously with a lot of additional effort and lots of other ideas supporting the original core one. You can tell this happens because ten startups may start with the same "idea" but end up with completely different concrete solutions on different platforms with different tradeoffs and each taking ten man-years of work to create. It's in those ten man-years of work that the value lies, not the core idea.
As proof that is where the value lies, many solid businesses exist that have done the work but haven't even hardly got an "idea" the way startup founders think of it, just exploited opportunity. What's the "big idea" behind a graphics design firm, or a plumbing company? On the other hand, try making money with an uninstantiated idea. Where the value comes from is pretty clear.
Now that you've presumably done some of that work, the core original idea remains as useless as ever, but the work done around it to get it some distance down the path to instantiation is not. A new idea would be starting back at square one, and once again be, yes, worthless.
I doubt that he really wants the idea so much as he wants to move forward with the instantiation.
(Ideas with no instantiation effort put into them are worthless because basically supply is effectively infinite.)
An idea is a direction. If he wants to move forward with the instantiation he's moving forward in the same direction. That's like saying paraphrasing isn't plagiarism. It's not the same if it's different.
You can tell this happens because ten startups may start with the same "idea" but end up with completely different concrete solutions
Airbnb is an idea. If you do it a little bit different it's still the same idea. The value lies in what the customer receives, not the man-years. If you've built something with large customer benefit then you've done something. But the customer benefit comes from the direction the original idea took.
Now that you've presumably done some of that work, the core original idea remains as useless as ever
If the idea has changed completely then yes, but that's probably a different idea. Google search is still Google search even though they've added countless man-years to it.
He wants the idea because he wants to solve the same customer problem in the same way. Especially if the original idea unveiled a problem that was ignored. An idea can often identify a problem. No amount of implementation can do that.
This is the problem with metaphors. They get misunderstood and misapplied.
I didn't mean a general direction, I meant a specific one. Like a telephone is different from a cellphone. Landlines have only so much potential. You may attribute cellphones to implementation, but someone had to figure it out.
How many millions of man hours would make AirBnB worth more than Groupon? Not the best example, but I'm sure you get it. Ideas have limits, but so does implementation.
The problem is that we become focused and attached to ideas. It becomes hard to seriously consider other ideas once you've fallen in love with one. We lose objectivity.
So I said "If ideas are so cheap, why don't you think of a better one?" <crickets>
It's getting to the point where people say it without thinking.