Why most good ideas never happen

Over the years, I have seen a surprising number of genuinely good ideas disappear. Not because they were obviously unrealistic or because the people behind them lacked ambition, but often despite the fact that there seemed to be every reason to pursue them. Someone had identified a real customer problem, spotted a change in the market or realised that new technology made something possible that wasn’t possible before. There was energy around the idea, people could see the potential, and for a while it felt as though something new was about to happen.

Then, quite often, it didn’t.

For a long time, I thought this was mainly an execution problem. After more than twenty years working across strategy, product, design, marketing and digital, I have come to see it somewhat differently. Execution obviously matters, but many ideas get into trouble long before execution becomes the real issue. They remain ideas for too long, while the different parts of the business around them are developed separately — or sometimes not developed at all.

We may spend a great deal of time refining the proposition without really understanding the economics behind it. We may design an attractive customer experience without considering what it will require operationally. We can become fascinated by what a new technology makes possible before we have established whether it solves a problem that matters enough. And it is surprisingly easy to build an impressive business case on assumptions that have never really been tested outside the organisation.

There is a reason this happens. Most companies are organised into disciplines and functions. New businesses aren’t.

That distinction has become increasingly important to how I think about Business Design.

A business is a system

A new proposition never exists on its own. It needs people who value it enough to choose it. There has to be an experience through which they discover, buy and use it. Technology may be needed to enable that experience, operations have to be capable of delivering it, and the economics need to make sense. Ultimately, all of those elements have to work together in a business model that can survive outside a presentation.

This idea isn’t new. One of the most influential principles in design thinking is the relationship between desirability, feasibility and viability: successful innovation has to make sense for people, be possible to deliver and work as a business. IDEO has used these lenses extensively in its approach to human-centred innovation.

In my own work, I have found it useful to unpack that thinking a little further. At Everbeam, we look at a business through six connected dimensions: proposition, experience, technology, operations, economics and business model.

What matters to me about this model isn’t really the six elements. It is what happens between them. A change in the proposition can alter the experience that needs to be delivered; that experience may require different technology or create new operational requirements; those choices affect the economics, which in turn may force us to rethink the proposition. It is a system of dependencies rather than a collection of separate design tasks.

That sounds obvious when written down, yet organisations routinely develop these things separately. Strategy establishes a direction, research investigates customers, design works on the proposition and experience, technology determines what can be built, finance examines the economics, and operations eventually has to work out how the whole thing can actually be delivered. There is nothing inherently wrong with having specialists doing each of those things — quite the opposite. The difficulty arises when the idea travels between them through a sequence of handovers.

I have seen projects where every individual discipline appeared to have done good work and yet the result still didn’t quite work as a business. Somewhere between all the specialist contributions, nobody had really been responsible for designing the connections.

That is where Business Design becomes interesting to me. I don’t see it as another discipline that should sit alongside strategy, design, technology or finance. Its value is in connecting them around the business we are trying to create and allowing the different dimensions to influence each other much earlier.

And once you begin looking at a new business that way, something else becomes very apparent: much of what initially looks like knowledge is actually assumption.

From belief to evidence

Every new business idea contains beliefs about the future. We believe that a particular group of customers has a problem worth solving, that our proposition will be more attractive than the alternatives and that people will behave in a particular way when we put it in front of them. At the same time, we are making assumptions about what we can build, what it will cost to deliver and whether the resulting economics will support a viable business.

The problem isn’t that we make assumptions. It would be impossible to create anything new without them. The problem is when assumptions quietly become facts simply because they have appeared often enough in presentations and spreadsheets.

This is one of the things I like about Alexander Osterwalder and Strategyzer’s approach to business experimentation. Instead of beginning by asking how we can demonstrate that an idea is right, they advocate identifying the hypotheses on which the idea depends and asking what would have to be true for it to work. The riskiest assumptions can then be tested before the organisation commits disproportionate time and money to them.

That creates a subtly different mindset. We are no longer trying to win an argument for the idea. We are trying to understand it.

I think of that movement very simply as going from belief to evidence.

The purpose isn’t to remove uncertainty — no experiment can do that completely — but to reduce the uncertainty that matters. If the entire business depends on customers being willing to change a deeply embedded behaviour, that is probably more important to understand than whether they prefer one version of a feature to another. If the economics only work at a scale we have no realistic way of reaching, that deserves attention before months are spent perfecting the customer experience.

This is also why I think making is such an important part of business development. There comes a point in almost every project where another meeting, spreadsheet or presentation stops adding much. The idea needs to leave the room.

That doesn’t mean building the finished product. It means making the idea concrete enough for reality to respond to it. Depending on what we are trying to learn, that might be a prototype, a proposition, a customer journey, a commercial offer, a landing page or a small piece of working technology. The form matters less than the question we are trying to answer.

Something changes when people have something real to react to. Customers behave differently when faced with an actual choice than when asked whether they like a hypothetical concept. Internal disagreements that have remained abstract suddenly become specific. Technical constraints become visible. Economic assumptions can be challenged against something tangible. Sometimes you discover that the thing everybody was convinced customers would love leaves them completely indifferent.

That may feel disappointing, but it is extremely valuable information — particularly if you discover it after two weeks rather than two years.

This principle is central to experimental approaches to business creation. Strategyzer’s work on prototyping and testing similarly argues for beginning with inexpensive, low-fidelity experiments and increasing investment as evidence becomes stronger. The important point isn’t simply that prototypes are cheaper than finished products. It is that making something is a way of thinking. It exposes assumptions that can remain invisible for a surprisingly long time when an idea exists only in words.

The rapid development of AI has made this even more interesting. We can now move from an idea to something that looks and behaves remarkably real in days or sometimes hours. I find that enormously exciting, but there is a paradox in it as well: as our ability to build increases, the fact that we can build something becomes less useful as evidence that we should. We can now build the wrong thing much faster too.

So the important questions increasingly move upstream. Is the problem worth solving? For whom? What value would we create, and how would that translate into value for the business? Which assumptions does the idea depend on, and which of them have we actually tested? Technology can dramatically shorten the distance between imagination and execution, but it cannot answer those questions for us.

Turning ideas into progress

All of this has gradually changed the way I think about the journey from an idea to a real business. I am wary of complicated innovation processes because they can create the impression that progress comes from completing a prescribed sequence of activities. In reality, developing something new is much messier than that.

At Everbeam, we have deliberately reduced that journey to four ideas:

We find what is genuinely worth pursuing and understand the problem well enough to know why it matters. We design the business around the idea, bringing the different parts of the system together rather than treating the proposition in isolation. We make enough of it to expose the assumptions to reality. And we prove the things that need to be true before committing more capital, time and organisational energy.

I like the simplicity of the model, although the arrows are slightly misleading. Real projects rarely move neatly from left to right. Making something can reveal that the proposition needs to change. Testing the proposition may show that we have misunderstood the customer. A technical constraint can force us back into the design. New evidence can change the economics and therefore the entire business model.

Moving backwards in that situation isn’t a failure of the process. It is exactly what the process is supposed to make possible. Strategyzer describes a similar dynamic between designing, testing, learning and iterating in the search for a viable business model.

The objective isn’t to get through the process. It is to emerge from it knowing substantially more than when you entered it, having spent as little as reasonably possible learning the things that could have killed the idea later.

That is also why I have become slightly sceptical when I hear that an organisation needs more ideas. Sometimes it does. But most of the organisations I have worked with have not suffered from a shortage of imagination. There are ideas in strategy presentations, product backlogs, innovation programmes, customer research and conversations throughout the business. What is often missing is a reliable way of moving the right ideas from possibility to reality.

Doing that requires more than creativity and more than execution. It requires connecting the disciplines that normally sit apart, being explicit about what we know and what we merely believe, and being willing to put ideas in contact with reality while they are still cheap enough to change.

It also means accepting that some genuinely good ideas shouldn’t become businesses. If an experiment gives us convincing evidence to stop, we haven’t failed. We have avoided investing in something that wasn’t going to work and created room for something that might.

The ideas that survive that process are different. They are no longer compelling because we have become good at explaining them. They are compelling because the proposition, experience, technology, operations and economics are beginning to reinforce one another — and because there is evidence that the world outside the organisation cares.

That, to me, is the difference between having a good idea and designing a business.

Ideas are everywhere. Turning them into real progress is the harder part.