No idea is completely novel - Founder’s dilemma to protect idea!
No idea is completely novel - Founder’s dilemma to protect idea!
A number of startup founders and aspiring entrepreneurs come up with new ideas. Or that is that they think that their idea is so novel and it has so much intellectual value, that they hesitate to open this idea to anyone fearing that the idea may be copied.?
I have reviewed many such ideas and found out that there are hardly any ideas which are completely novel. We perceive an idea to be novel, both the inventor and those who come across the idea for the first time, tend to assume that the idea is unique and novel as they are observing it for the first time.?
This is similar to “Availability Bias” or like the famous “Black Swan” theory
Availability Bias (also called as Availability Heuristics) limits us to assume that what is known to us only is available there in the world.
“The availability bias is the human tendency to think that examples of things that come readily to mind are more representative than is actually the case”
if something does not come to our mind readily we think that it is not available in the world.?
“ A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight” Source: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blackswan.asp?
Similarly the highly guarded ideas that would be entrepreneurs present to potential partners or investors, hesitantly fearing that it may be stolen, is most likely already been tried or being implemented by someone in the world. The problem is despite the best algorithms of Google Search there are still many things out there which are not known to us.?
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Do I mean then there cannot be novel ideas at all? Of course, there may be many novel and innovative ideas. First place to check is perhaps the patent office or perhaps one can even apply if the idea is very valuable so that he or she has some protection. But there are millions of ideas which have been patented and not all of them have been commercially successful. Similarly there are millions of copycat ideas which have been taken up by many people and executed but not all of them are successful.
Never stop only at protecting the idea, but dare to execute.?
Be it e-commerce or fast food chain or even space mission, the key to success is execution. One cannot build a moat ( or barrier to others entering your space) without taking steps to execute ruthlessly. Even when others have wide and deep moats, you can always find a small gap to exploit.?
Even calculus was simultaneously invented by two scientists who are separated by long physical distances. We know that both Newton and Leibniz almost at the same time worked on the most path breaking mathematical idea , called Calculus.?
The idea of E-commerce is nothing but an advanced version of the Mail order catalog business. The incremental innovation of many ideas happen when a new technology and process is made possible by the introduction of changes in science, technology and societal behaviour. But remember, many are simultaneously watching the same patterns emerge. Those who succeed, jump in and start executing, not hesitating to open the idea to the world.??
My recommendation to startup entrepreneurs are as following
Remember, if you delay, the circumstances change rapidly rendering your idea obsolete. Dare to go out and execute.?
The title was making one believe it to be true which is aptly disproven in the paragraph inside. Given the invention of wheel happened so recently and we see obvious things today as breakthroughs make one believe there is no scarcity of novel ideas. Getting out of the existing knowledge bias is key !