IDEA or EXECUTION

This is in response to a question on a community site, "What Is it that you think is more important for any business to flourish? IDEA or EXECUTION? "

There are ample of ideas with people in business and non-business community, however a bad execution would spoil the hardwork to bring the idea into reality. Transformation of idea to a product is crucial. To convert this into a flourishing business one more important factor, which I think you missed out, is TIMING. I will talk about it towards the end of it.

Lets look at these components one by one. Let me also take an analogy with a tree.

1.IDEA : An idea is a seed. What you think it would require to grow and not just grow well but to the extent that it fetches profit to the owner is what you might call as a flourishing business. The important things would be,

a) RIGHT SEASON or CONTEXT - TIMING
b) RIGHT NURTURING – EXECUTION

You can sell your IDEA to someone who might convert it into a flourishing business. A common example of this is the ideas generated by employees of a company. These companies, in the name of providing the basic infrastructure for your 'IDEA', would get a patent. The company might use it in its own products or in other business contexts.

Another example of this is annihilation of small startups by bigger fishes in the pond to give them better appetite with either diversification or increased strength in the business area of their interest.

2.EXECUTION : So I will talk about the execution first as you had already mentioned it. Its the hardwork you put in to bring your idea to reality, lets call it a DELIVERABLE. The IDEA may be a dream, but unless you turn it into a DELIVERABLE you can not make money, the bottom line. I want to separate it from TIMING. As an example Alcatel in 1999-2000 came up with Optical Networks and was pioneering in this domain. The IDEA was great, the EXECUTION was exceptional, but the TIMING was wrong. Because of this, there was a huge burst in telecom industry in 2001-02 and other businesses directly dealing with technology suffered a hit.

3.TIMING : It is equally important, an IDEA in non-business community picks up only when the time of that IDEA has come. You might have heard it at places, "You can prevent an invasion of armies, but not an idea whose time has come' - by Nobelist Victor Hugo. Remember communist revolution, US revolution and in Europe after the 2nd world war. Change was needed and they went with different ideas of governance.

Coming to its business context as an example, the idea of xDSL was great, so was its execution. Many companies quickly took it while they were aware that it is only a temporary solution. Copper network would not be able to sustain in the bandwidth explosions of future, still it became popular in much of Europe, North America and part of Asia. They could harness the business potential of xDSL. There was a market potential of this IDEA, and much of it was created in rest of the world lately. Places, such as India, much of China, SAARC, and Africa, where the xDSL reached late, fiber is becoming popular.

To emphasis on TIMING, it is like the tree has grown, has excellent fruits because of great execution. Now it is time that you enter the market. If the market does not exist but there is a potential, create it. But if there is no market readiness, the whole preparation would probably mean nothing.

So if you are an entrepreneur, you must find a balance between these three to create a flourishing business out of your IDEA. Many startup fail just because one of the three is not well taken care of. They are equally important. Yet another thing not to be forgotten, innovation is highly important for sustaining a business at the 'flourishing' state, it might mean either business-innovation, technology-innovation or marketing-innovation. I hope this would be sufficient for you to understand the quest of an entrepreneur.