Innovation by way of perspiration

In my first column last semester, I wrote about how every great business begins with a great idea. While great ideas are crucial for the successful start of a business, they only help you do one thing: start. In fact, if business is a marathon, great ideas will allow you to gain the equivalent of a one-mile lead. The problem is there are five professional marathon runners on your back and 25.2 miles to go. Best of luck.\nIn business, it is a well-known fact that it takes most individuals many failed businesses to finally arrive at a successful venture. Why is this true? One would think that by mere coincidence, some individuals would come across a good idea on their first or second attempt.\nIt took me five years of success and failure to finally understand. The problem was that I was asking the wrong question. Ideas, I believed, were the main catalysts for successful companies. Boy was I wrong. \nI have read that great businesses are the result of: 1) great business people 2) great systems and 3) great products or services. If you read into this further, it basically translates that the most important aspect of business is the company's innovative nature and leaders that maneuver the company to success. The second most important aspect of business is the systems and controls that ensure that a company is efficient and that employees are working well together. The third most important aspect of a company is the ideas behind the production of a product or the rendering of a service. \nAs I slowly began to comprehend this concept, I started to examine the roots of my thinking that great businesses are the primary results of great ideas. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this idea had been hammered into my head by an instant-gratification society. In our society, individuals expect to master very difficult skills and professions very quickly. There is very little glamour in working years on a project or skill. We want to know everything, and we want it now.\nBy believing that ideas are the catalysts of great businesses, people gain the gratification of telling themselves that "If only I had had that idea, I could have been rich." This is simply not the case. Odds are that you probably would have failed miserably. However, the next time you had a great idea, you would have been that much closer.\nRather than giving examples of companies that help this theory, I would like to examine ventures that are thought to contradict it. One such venture is www.MillionDollarHomePage.com. A British college student put a Web site up where he sold each pixel (space) for $1 to companies in order to raise money for his tuition. Once he got some momentum going, he was able to leverage the media to publicize his page and thus brought even more advertisers to the page. Eventually, he sold a million pixels for one million dollars.\nThe first time I heard this, I thought that it was an insult to entrepreneurship. His idea for the page was hardly revolutionary. I think even he would admit that it was not that great. What was brilliant was his success in convincing advertisers to pay him to advertise on a page that had no content. Even more brilliant was his tactical partnership with the media that helped push his page mainstream. \nAnother common counter-example that people like to point out is Google. First off, let me assure you that Google is not a typical company. This being said, it is still a great example of the rule rather than the exception. The idea that created the search engine was a complex algorithm that allowed people to search keywords for the most relevant pages. This idea was interesting and very useful to individuals. However, in the beginning, it was just that: a cool search engine and not a great business. It was not until the creation of their intuitive Adwords and Adsense programs that helped bring in advertisers and subsequently brought revenue to the site that Google became a great business. Excellent strategic business moves, culminating with the founders' decision to go public, are truly what made Google the giant it is today. \nIt is important to understand that a good idea can only bring you so far. As the great inventor Thomas Edison, once said: "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration"