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In our past posts we’ve talked a lot about ideas, the role they play in startups, how to nurture them and a whole lot more. All said and done, what is the value of an idea alone?

As a serial entrepreneur having founded several of my own startups, as well as and having had even more business and product ideas that were initiated in one form or another, there remains an even bigger number of ideas that were never done, at least not by myself.

Moreover, having worked mentoring hundreds of entrepreneurs, very rarely have I had my own ideas come to me through someone else. That does not mean that my ideas always are or have been unique, just pointing out what I have seen (checking the unique factor with Google should always be the first step). Since I have had most of my ideas copied after bringing those to the market, I could say I’ve learned a thing or two about the value of an idea.

After being a serial entrepreneur for 15+ years you will learn what the true value of an idea alone is. The value of the idea alone is nothing, zero, zip, nada. I know many new entrepreneurs won’t agree with me and don’t like to hear that, but that’s just the way it is.

It can only begin to have value when it’s an idea + execution. Till then, it’s still just an idea. When you combine an idea + great team + execution, it can start to have potential, but the real value remains zero, until it gets tested/evaluated by real customers. That’s when you can start to estimate the real potential of “the whole package”, again not the idea alone.

Like myself, most entrepreneurs view the world a bit differently than others and therefore see business opportunities and ideas more commonly within it. When you have more ideas than you can practically execute, the question on “what should you do with them?” comes up.

You can either try to integrate ideas into your existing business, but more often than not you also come up with ideas that do not fit to your own business. So the next option is to evaluate if the idea is better than what you are currently working on and evaluate if it’s worth making a bigger change in the direction all together. Like many other situations in life, you either forget it and move on, or it continues to bother you and you feel you need to do something about it.

So what else you can do? You can try to sell the idea, but that is also close to impossible if not done as the primary focus, so you then need to start a new business around it and build another team to execute. Or , just pass it on to others to be free from thinking about it.

For this very reason, in our Talks (free discussion forum for all registered members), we have now added a new section called “Ideas”. In ideas you can share those ideas that you may have, but are not in a position to execute or do justice to the ideas and therefore are happy to share them with others. After this, you are free from thinking about it, as now it’s not your problem alone anymore and you are just happy if someone else will see the value in it.

So, maybe someone else does and decides to build a business around it and continue to develop it further. If that happens it may well be that the new team will also be interested to have you as their advisor and offer some equity from their startup (2-4%). Why? because that’s what I would do if I would be in their position. To be able to dip in for more details in the thinking behind the idea from someone who’s still motivated to see the idea to become reality.

So if you have ideas that are on your mind, bothering you with no outlet to pass them on, feel free to share them in our ideas section at talks (http://www.growvc.com/talks/ideas). The very least you will receive is feedback from other venture community members to see if the idea would have legs or not.

For new entrepreneurs this will be one source to compare own ideas to other ideas and pool for potential new ideas to develop further or to add those to own business. If nothing else, at least it should be fun to play with ideas, give feedback and develop them further as a community.

There! I have shared one of my extra ideas already, dare to share yours?

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Tags: community, Entrepreneur, idea, ideas, Reality, startup, value

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Business Education, Entrepreneur Motivation, How to invest in startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.