What an "Idea" Sir Ji .......

Hi Friends,
So, I am back after spending few of the most memorable moments of my life and believe me, I am going to cherish them forever and ever. I hope non of you missed any posts by aman and himanshu. Vijaya.. you can have a word with aman and he would be replying your question as i have delegated my jobs and poor aman has got the job to reply all the questions.

So now i am going to do what i am best at.. arrey yaar tum logon ko pakana aur kya???

And all of a sudden i got an IDEA .........

IDEA, I have it , You have it, All of us have plenty of ideas in our minds,.Origin of almost everything. God had an idea to create Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve had an idea to eat that apple, that's how they got an idea of love making which gave birth to another person with loads and loads of ideas.i do't know but perhaps many many years back there were only few people on the earth and now there are billions of people, same is with the ideas.

In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images;like images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images. Many philosophers consider ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of being.The capacity to create and understand the meaning of ideas is considered to be an essential and defining feature of human beings.In a popular sense, an idea arises in a reflex, spontaneous manner, even without thinking or serious reflection.After this intensive meaning of "Idea", Let's get a bit practical about it. Is an idea always original?? Is it always innovative?? Is it always creative or destructive?? or is it just another term for "being inspired"?? Idea can be a result of "thinking excellence" or "thinking failure". Now i would like to discuss these two aspects of Idea.I was so good in thinking about this topic to write or perhaps i was unable to think about any other tangible thing, which fetch me this "Idea" to write about "Idea" itself..( and i still don't have any idea about it).I don't think that an idea can be original coz a need of something leads to have an idea, an outcome of a thought leads to have an idea. But is an "Idea" worth all the credit which it gets after any invention, any success or any failure?? As i have mentioned arlier, we all think and we all have "ideas" in out minds. Quite often we say "it's a good idea" or "it's a bad idea".But is it idea itself which makes it good or bad or is it something else??.I reckon every idea is good, innovative and creative however it's the execution which makes it good, bad or ugly.Here’s the problem with the formulation. It belies a misunderstanding of what an actionable “idea” really is. A good idea is almost never some light bulb moment that occurs where you realize some insight that no one else has seen. In truth there are few of those. Very, very few people are that smart or that lucky. Great actionable ideas are really a collection of much smaller ideas, weaved together in such a way as to create something useful unique and compelling. There are few actionable “aha” and "eureka"moments.

In other words, to me, coming up with great actionable ideas requires lots of perspiration, iteration, and ideation. However, once you have an actionable idea that has been achieved through this process it is worth way more than 1%. I would say getting to this point is worth easily 50% and perhaps well more than 50% of the value of your enterprise. Actionable and truly compelling business ideas are incredibly valuable. And most people that say otherwise probably don’t have them. For example if you open up a shoe store at Lajpat Nagar, there is likely no “idea” there. But if you have developed a set of insights which allows you to develop a cost effective and safe raw material, that is certainly a valuable idea.

The problem is that people confuse the idea creation process with the execution process. They are different. I think one can, at times, blend the idea creation process with the development process, but there are important distinctions. When development is just execution of some defined idea, that is not idea creation. That is part of execution.

On the other hand, when the development process is part of the ideation process, you have set the stage for an environment where real creativity is possible. But in order for this to work, the development process must be more interactive and less goal-oriented. Great ideas come from having a bit of a “lab-like” environment in the early stages of your process. This is because exploration is almost always required to achieve a great compelling concept. Few of us has the ability to see with clarity a really useful idea from the beginning of the process, which is why iteration and stepwise refinement is so important.

This leads to what I think is a very important issue in the idea development process. There are lots of people who strongly suggest that you should do your development in public. It is part of the “release early and often” concept. But I also believe that this concept is not effective in developing great ideas because it is limiting. The minute that you get real people involved, their needs become much more pedestrian. They will yell loudly about things that may be important to their use of the product, but they will rarely yell about some new game-changing concept. In fact they will resist radical change and rethinking because it messes with their now committed workflow. And now you are comitted to supporting them.

To be clear, I am not saying that a mediocre idea can't be a good business. But good businesses are not all great ideas.

So as I see it, if you want to do something great, you should strongly consider whether you have enough meat on your conceptual bone before you decide to release publicly. Because when you get users involved, it is the equivalent of putting the saw and the screwdriver down and grabbing the sand paper. There will likely be few additional big ideas after that point.
And so the point of all of this is that I feel few people really respect the process of creating big ideas. Compelling idea creation is hard and it is incredibly valuable. And as I see it, the “release early and often” trend is a reflection of a broad-based acceptance of incrementalism, in lieu of real creativity..

To uncomplicate the above said things, An idea remains an idea till the time you don't loose the soul of it. It looses value when you start thinking about the acceptance of your idea and it's pretty much like taking a help of a public pole to decide if you child is good enough to be called your child or not. When we start thinking about the acceptance of an idea and we modify it to get it accepted by others, it becomes a product and a product can neither be valued nor be respected, it can only be sold.

And with 24 years of experience, I have learnt that Ideas are not great, It's our intention and execution which makes them great.

Cheers...