Great article swombat. Here's another exercise for differentiating opportunities from ideas: turn the tv on to a random channel, preferably a channel that cove

Great article swombat. Here's another exercise for differentiating opportunities from ideas: turn the tv on to a random channel, preferably a channel that covers some area you normally aren't interested in. Pay close attention to the commercials. These are probably for products (ideas) that you find no value in at all. Yet somebody just like yourself is making these commercials and making a boatload of money doing it. Why? What opportunities did they see in ideas that you would find worthless? Can you see how the idea may be completely useless in your eyes, yet the opportunity very valuable? The title was such that I was able to upvote this article before I even read it! (Yes, I did actually RTA) I knew exactly where you were going. An opportunity is an idea + value. It's the addition of the value that makes it so different than just run of the mill ideas. An idea might be to write a text indexing system built on references like research papers are ranked. An opportunity is making a simple-to-use web search engine so folks can more easily find what they are looking for. Big difference. The more I think about it, the more I feel we should eliminate the word "idea" completely from discussions about startups. All the talk should only be about opportunities.