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The Initial Value of an Idea is Zero

Axel Schultze — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 13:32:35 +0000

You have a new business idea. You are so excited that it quickly becomes your best-kept secret. You get almost paranoid about somebody stealing this great concept that apparently nobody else figured out yet. Now – one day you have to share the secret, when you hire somebody helping you to build the product or when you ask somebody what they think or when you want the first customers to try it out.

Most of those ideas will never see the day of light – the fear that somebody steals it is greater than the ambition to make it happen. OR – you may not even want to realize it yourself but have somebody else do the work and you want to sell it. You will find out that there is no customer for it. And here is the first clue: The average human generates about 10,000+ up to 30,000 ideas during their lifecycle. Times 7.5 Billion people, that is 140 Trillion ideas!!! We are drowning in ideas. Hence – the initial value of your idea is exactly ZERO. To make a long story short: all its value is created when an idea is turned into reality. And that is the ENTIRE value, not most of it or half of it.

The initial value of an idea is zero

No one can actually ‘steal’ an idea. All people can do is to make it much better right from the get-go. If it is an outstanding and truly new invention, file a patent if that makes you feel better. But consider yourself warned. More often than not are patents the reason for failure. Customers want choice and not yet another technology dictator. They want options and not a monopoly. If Tim Berners-Lee would have received a patent for his HTTP and HTML protocol we simply would either not have an Internet as we know it, or none at all. Because the days where somebody pays royalty fees are pretty much gone.

The entire value is created through relentless execution

Meaning only when you turn your idea into reality, work with smart and engaging people, as well as working with your potential customers, you will win. And if somebody executes better than you, they will win – no matter what. Even with a patent, competitors will try everything to find an alternative. And they will find one, which makes them even stronger.

Stop worrying start doing

Cowards will never bring an idea to life because they are more fearful their idea will be stolen than they fear to fail. If you feel you are too weak to execute – go back to square one and rationalize that it is all about execution, and look for a partner who can execute while you craft the concept for your idea. If you have nobody you can trust, work on your network. If you have no network, build it.

Every outstanding idea is usually created multiple times at the same time. Did you ever wonder why most breakthrough concepts happen around the same time in different places? Some may be a blunt copy, but most just happen because the time is right, the base to build a new step in the evolution of something is perfectly prepared and a need from a market is pushing it to reality. It doesn’t matter whether it was copied or the same idea was created multiple times by chance – getting it done is the real value – not having a brain fart

Why Espionage?

You may think, why is espionage such a big deal on a global scale? Keep thinking: This is the worst way to get to leadership. It is well known that many of the largest enterprises and governments try to find out what their competitors do – so they can do it too and hope to be better. That particular behavior obviously results in “follower-ship”. And follower-ship is by definition not leadership. Every leader welcomes followers – why? Because only with followers they can become a leader. As a result companies or governments with huge engagement in espionage are doomed to fail in the long run – and history can prove it over and over again.

Putting it all together

Share your idea with great people who can help you make it happen. Involve potential customers before you even build a prototype. Then build an initial version of your idea matching what the market will need now or later. The more innovative you are the smaller is the initial customer base. Groundbreaking innovation is only taken by early adopters. As soon as you can show your first results, be as bold as you can get and invite others to follow your ideas. Never “hide” your ideas from competitors. You can only become a market leader if you have followers. And while the followers copy your idea, you already have a new version, a next-generation solution that gets you closer to your ultimate product vision. A great example is currently in the Automobile industry. Tesla challenged the market leader Mercedes Benz with groundbreaking innovation. ten years later Mercedes Benz accepted the challenge but not by innovating but by following Tesla’s lead. Despite the fact that Mercedes has a superior display over Teslas – the augmented reality head-up display that theoretically would replace all the old dashboards – but they felt forced by the new leader to follow and introduced a massive, old-style display across the entire front.

Please share your thoughts and ideas with other innovative people on BlueCallom’s Deep Innovation Design, Innovation Management System, and Neuroideation LinkedIn Group.

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From Invention to Innovation

Axel Schultze — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 18:45:44 +0000

In the past four years, we were attempting to understand how innovation is actually created and analyzed how we were building startups that became ten years later billion-dollar companies. We were also exploring how other startups that became billion-dollar companies created their ideas and successes. We found striking insights about the difference in innovations power between startups and established billion-dollar enterprises – who were startups themselves just a few decades ago. Also, we explored the difference between invention and innovation.

From invention to innovation

The automobile evolved from INVENTION to INNOVATION. The disk brakes moved from INVENTION to IMPROVEMENT. The first electric BMW car made it from INVENTION to an EXPERIMENT, while Tesla made it to INNOVATION without even having it invented. A self-driving Mercedes S-Class made a 1,000-mile journey from Munich to Copenhagen and back in 1992! It was already using computer vision and computers to react in real-time. The autonomous car achieved speeds exceeding 110 miles per hour (175 km/h) on the German Autobahn with nearly no human intervention for 95% of the distance. It drove in traffic, executing maneuvers to pass other cars. Also, here, all the necessary inventions have not been taken to innovation but ended up in drawers. Analyzing the reasons is equally complex and interesting but exceeds the purpose of this post. We will do this in another post.

Invention vs. Innovation

In most enterprises, we may find hundreds if not thousands of geniuses with fabulous ideas but no way to go. There is this massive difference between INVENTION and INNOVATION. INVENTION is the act of having and documenting an idea, maybe building a prototype, and perhaps even being granted one or more patents. Unfortunately, the invention is of no value at all. Bringing such an invention to market, scale the business or business unit and make it a global success is when we talk about INNOVATIONS. The full cycle of invention, prototyping, market validation, product-market-fit, funding, marketing, testing, producing, launching, more funding, branding, selling, customer engagement, servicing, business model optimization, more funding, going international all the way up to being a global player in that segment is a successful innovation. Innovation is neither a product nor service nor the marketing or sales effort to make it big – INNOVATION is the result of a series of activities, engagements, teams, and market conditions that lead to groundbreaking new solutions for a larger group of users.

The value of innovation grows with its distribution!

The good news, pretty much every large enterprise on earth is struggling with being innovative. Even enterprises that came just two decades ago with highly innovative solutions to market, now struggling to be innovative. The bad news, more innovative startups, than ever before in history challenge any size enterprise. The question arises: Is the lifecycle of the innovation, the future lifecycle of a company in general?

The five biggest mistakes

The company never developed a comprehensive plan to identify the brilliant ideas, which their employees already created, usually based on their experience with the problem. Inventors are mostly not communicative managers but more introverted engineers!
Seeing the brain spark of an invention already as innovation and wonder why it is not successful in this highly competitive global economy.
Completely ignoring the fact that innovative businesses require a lot of funding to become that innovative business everybody is dreaming about.
Running innovation alongside and hoping for magical growth and market disruption.
Management teams never asked themselves where these ideas are actually coming from and how they can be harnessed.

What to do

A great starting point is to see the act of invention as an ignition point that triggers a comprehensive process of innovation.
It is far better to develop trust in the “Innovation Potential” of the company’s employees than looking into startups.
Rationalizing that any major innovation is also a significant investment, and there is no difference between a startup and a global enterprise.
Creating a serious effort to include customers into the innovation process and stop looking at what the competition is doing.
Stop hoping that employees think like startup entrepreneurs. If they would, they would be long gone, and if they stayed, they much better contribute to an enterprise-level innovation process.

We will share more findings and more insights as we progress.

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