The Power of Ideas – Part 1

I’ve been wrestling with several conflicting thoughts on ideas and their power lately, and thought I’d put them out into the blogosphere and see what you could add that might help me reconcile/organize them better.

Photo of U.S. Declaration of Independence from Flikr by Chuck Coker (Caveman 92223)

Certain Ideas Have Power

There are some examples of ideas that are so powerful and compelling that simply voicing them to enough people – letting them see the light of day – is enough to spread change. “All men are created equal” seems to me to be one of those. It not only helped rally the colonies to the cause, it helped spread democracy then and now.

From a business standpoint, there’s only one example I have heard of a business idea so powerful simply in its conception – Free e-mail accounts that can be accessed anonymously, over the web and that automatically promoted itself – that VCs were willing to pay a significant premium just to be in on it. It’s certainly easy to see now how powerful that idea was and how important it was to be a first mover on it.

But Ideas Alone Are Never Enough

Even looking at just these two ideas, which were the most compelling I could find for the stand-alone power of ideas, it’s easy to see that execution – the successful implementation of the idea – is still absolutely critical.

The Declaration of Independence – and it’s codification of the idea that “all men are created equal” would mean little had the colonies not persevered in their revolution and won independence. The idea had power, but it was still a few thousand men living with hardship led by a few dedicated, talented and lucky leaders, with help from Holland and France and others that made it an example others could and would follow.

Hotmail had just as many possible points of failure. Had Sabeer Bhatia not managed his VC meetings as well, had Hotmail not worked well enough, had he held out too long or not long enough, things could easily have turned out differently. Indeed, GMail may have now overcome Hotmail, showing finally in the market that the idea is not the critical factor, but the implementation.

From literature and advertising there are even more examples “1984″, both the book and the Apple Commercial, were great concepts, but had they not been well executed there’s no way we’d still be talking about them decades later. There have been dozens of examples of works about star-crossed lovers, but Romeo & Juliet is still the best execution of the concept, and the standard all others still strive to meet.

What Do You Think?

What examples do you have of ideas of such power that their implementation is basically not a factor? I’m truly at a loss on this – I can’t find any. Truth is, while a great idea helps, I’m more convinced every year that good ideas can and should be given away freely because the implementation is all that matters and 99% of the population won’t or can’t implement the idea at all or as well, so there’s no reason to fear theft of the idea.

I’d love to be proven wrong.