It amuses me how the initial proposals for what turn out to be great ideas often are so relatively narrow and small. The anecdote about the Xerox photocopier's R&D being justified by adding up the number of secretaries and the number of documents replicated via mimeograph comes to mind. [Sorry, couldn't find link]
What we don't ever see are the absurdly optimistic justifications for really bad ideas. Cuecat? Iridium satellites? The supposed future ubiquity if the Segway? We only know about the flops which because big enough (or were hyped enough) to have gotten publicity. Have you ever seen the abysmal nature of business plans in a local business plan competition?
I almost included Webvan, but I'm not sure that it was an inherently bad idea -- just one which required high adoption levels to achieve positive cash flow. And, I didn't include things like pets.com which I suspect (without justification) were known by their inventors as bad-but-flip-able ideas.
What we don't ever see are the absurdly optimistic justifications for really bad ideas. Cuecat? Iridium satellites? The supposed future ubiquity if the Segway? We only know about the flops which because big enough (or were hyped enough) to have gotten publicity. Have you ever seen the abysmal nature of business plans in a local business plan competition?
I almost included Webvan, but I'm not sure that it was an inherently bad idea -- just one which required high adoption levels to achieve positive cash flow. And, I didn't include things like pets.com which I suspect (without justification) were known by their inventors as bad-but-flip-able ideas.