The neverending rebuttal of "a great idea is enough". It seems to me that having a great idea would help... but I wonder if even that is necessary... I've been

The neverending rebuttal of "a great idea is enough". It seems to me that having a great idea would help... but I wonder if even that is necessary... I've been reading Christensen, on "disruption", and there's the concepts of: - targeting non-consumption (or non-consuming contexts - e.g. users of phones, but not while mobile) - asymmetric motivation, where low income or low margins or small markets etc. look great to (poor) you, but a rounding-error to (rich) incumbents. So they don't fight you. - independent value networks, where you don't tap into any part of the way the incumbents do business. You don't use their suppliers; you don't use their sales channels, you don't target their customers. To use a value network, you have to fit in with it, you have to integrate with; you have to work with it - these means that you must constrain your business in some way. This has two effects: 1. if it's their network, your business will be more similar to theirs, and therefore easier for them to adapt to it, to attack you on your home ground, and co-opt the new market you created; 2. being constrained by some pre-existing way of doing business makes you less adaptable to whatever this new market needs, what the customers need, what the business idea needs. You are hampered from serving it. - asymmetric skills, which is just the experience you get in making your particular business work. It's the accumulation of engineering problems you solve each day and gradually adapting your approach to suit them and having insights about how to reorganize to deal with them best; it's the accumulation of knowledge about your customers, what they want, how to reach them, what matters to them, what doesn't, along with repeatedly getting that to work. And so on - it's every part of making the business work. The more adapted you are to your customers and needs (and assuming this is different from what your competitors do - see the previous point), the greater a barrier to entry it is. That is, you become the incumbent in this new market, and you have the strengths that come along with that. So, you might have an idea of a new market, that meets the above characteristics, and it seems that that idea would be valuable: a great idea. However... I'm starting to think that instead of all that careful reasoning, perhaps you could just say "here's my idea" (meaning an original idea, not a copy), and start doing what a business needs to do: find customers, serve them, improve your product, etc. Wouldn't all the above points follow automatically, provided you just "did it your way"? And isn't that how so many of today's great companies started? If this is true (is it? I don't know), then the idea doesn't matter at all, so long as it's yours (original and motivating). Any thoughts on this, esp if you've read Christensen?