On Ideas and their Value

August 10th, 2009

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A recent tweet of mine may deserve some proper discussion, let me elaborate it here a little bit more:

Let me also state that this is not a ground breaking discovery whatsoever, but it may help you put things into the right perspective and focus where you need to, especially if you are an aspiring entrepreneur in your very first steps.

‘
An idea’s value is directly proportionate to the time you invest turning it into reality.
Corollary I: no time → zero value
Corollary II: your time is bounded, so is your idea’s value
Corollary III: given your abilities, what only matters is time spent on execution

Simple as that, end of story.
Or actually not. I could go further providing some examples and my train of thought before converging to such a simplistic approximation of an evaluation model, next to its implications for entrepreneurs, but I’d love to hear your feelings and feedback first.
Discuss.

nikan

The proper phrasing should be:
"An idea’s value is directly proportionate to the time invested in turning it to reality."
The time does not have to be invested by the one that initially conceived the idea. My take on this here: http://webtropic.cc/2008/08/18/a-surplus-of-ide...

George Tziralis

Nikos, I agree, I'm putting it here from the perspective of the idea holder and aspiring entrepreneur. Bottom line, you shall better do not expect a lot by just "contributing" an idea, and not investing any of your time trying to properly document it and make it happen (even hiring and managing other people to do the job requires a considerable amount of time). After all, you are the first to downgrade it into something less valuable than your very own time in the first place, right after you conceived it. And, if you were the first who didn't believe in it, I consider it almost fictitious -or even ridiculous (just like this one, http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/23/ten-years-... to, let's say, demand a compensation or anything.
Another more harsh parallelism is the one of a kid's adoption. You may bring a child to the world, but then throw it in another's hand, I do believe the latter one who committed by putting all means of effort and time to bring up the child is the one who should take any credit of the "results".

spyros

t=time, v=value

v = if(t=0, 0, x*g*h*e*a*z*v*b*t)

george tziralis log