Anyone can have a great idea

Most successful e-businesses appear to have succeeded through someone having a great idea and then following through with it. But, during the dot-com boom at the turn of the century, it seemed that just about everybody had a great idea for an e-business. In almost every office in the world, people were plotting and planning Web sites. Not only was this happening in business offices, it was happening in all kinds of social gatherings, pubs and clubs, universities and colleges and even school playgrounds. Even people who hadn't used a computer before were suggesting ideas for e-businesses.

With millions of people coming up with ideas, it is a statistical certainty that some of them will succeed, just as it is a statistical certainty that someone with a lottery ticket will win the lottery. And, just like having a lottery ticket, a good idea may get you into the game, but, it doesn't guarantee success.

With so many people and businesses coming up with ideas, it is pretty hard to come up with something completely original. Anyone who has made any serious effort to follow through with an e-business idea will soon tell you how true this is. A quick search around the Web will almost certainly uncover somebody already working on any good idea you can come up with, however original it might appear to be.

If it really is a great idea, then there is likely to be many different people working on something similar; maybe even e-mail discussion forums discussing its implementation in various different forms. This can be very disconcerting and depressing for newcomers to the world of e-business.

It might seem that the key to success is in putting an idea into operation faster than anyone else: by being the first to market. However, this is a fallacious argument because if an idea is seen to work, others are likely to copy and improve upon it, leaving the originator disadvantaged because they will have carried the cost of the pioneering and the test marketing.

Common sense tells you that with millions of people trying to think up great ideas for e-businesses, and millions of others looking for ideas to copy, it's no good relying on originality as being a key ingredient of an e-business formula for success. There will almost certainly be many others with similar ideas that you will have to compete against.

This puts the emphasis on the competitiveness of the position, not on the idea itself. Any idea must be accompanied by circumstances that provide a strong competitive advantage. Without this, a great idea is about as useful as an arrow without a bow.