Value of Ideas

As a developer/software engineer/hacker you feel powerful with the knowledge that given time you can build anything you can think up. Regardless of the extent of truth in this belief, you take pride in learning and finding new ways for translating thought into systems. As such, you think that your only limiting factor is ideas, and hence you begin to value them, guarding your own and potentially borrowing others. Well, that's my theory...

I have considered this topic before in the context of ideas in academic research, although it naturally applies to business. When you start reading about the retrospective stories from entrepreneurs, the common theme is that the initial premise is irrelevant, that directions change, ideas shift and rapidly iterate. You are quickly educated that ideas alone are worthless, that there is no market for them, and worse still smart people can have really bad ones.

The lesson obviously is that just thinking stuff up and talking about it doesn't get you very far, that the real ideas occur and/or the real value is in the instantiation of ideas. The lesson for the self-believing all-powerful hyper-productive hacker maybe to keep building things and continually refine an understanding of problem identification and solving.

About a 18 months ago I brainstormed an idea for an idea's website with a mate. It was pretty lame, although it stuck with me because in the back of my brain I still value ideas. Anyway, I was pondering these things, and came across some interesting things. I learned about the general notion of an idea bank and ideation, and a host of public idea bank-style websites. Two standouts include halfbakery (see Wikipedia), and Cambrian House (see RWW). Also see this great list of idea bank based websites.

Halfbakery has a nice minimal design, clean per-idea layout, and lots of ideas. Cambrian House are more commercial, and make a business from funding good ideas. Reading over the ideas on these sites and those like them highlight firstly some really interesting and innovating thinking, although more generally reinforce the premise that the lack of value in ideas alone.