If you build it, they will come.

Posted on | March 4, 2010

Now this may turn into a bit of a rant, but I’ll try to contain myself. I’m getting pretty sick of meeting people who fall into the trap of ‘If you build it, they will come”. I also like to call them the ‘I love my business so everyone will love my business’ people, but that seems a bit cumbersome to say.

There’s a simple fact I wish everyone would accept:

Not every idea can be turned into a workable business.

Honest.

That’s not me being negative, either. I really believe good ideas, if executed properly, have just as much chance of succeeding now as they have at any other time. It’s just that not every idea has a strong enough commercial angle to make it worth doing.

A good example of this tends to come out of the Universities. They have some really great people, and it’s good to see them supporting them with a pretty wide range of commercialisation and spin-out programmes. The problem, of course, is in the execution. The last time I went to one University’s showcase afternoon (my alma mater, it turns out) I was pretty appalled by the standard they presented to us. Out of around sixty spin-out ‘businesses’, there were probably only five projects that were really commercially viable.

Five. Out of close to sixty.

That’s a problem but, as they say, it’s their problem.

Closer to home, we get involved with investor-led projects quite a bit. Commercialisation strategy is one of our niche areas of speciality, so I get to see this argument from a couple of different angles.

I’m lucky in that I get to speak to a pretty wide variety of budding entrepreneurs and wacky inventors on a regular basis. Most of them are brimming with enthusiasm for their particular product or technology, but very few of them have really thought about what the commercial viability of their project is. It can be a pretty harsh reality check when they find out that there really isn’t the market for their dream, and there is a strong likelihood of not finding an investor to back them.

Turning an idea into reality – successfully bringing a new product to market – requires more than a lot of passion (although you need to have this as well). You need to understand where you fit into the marketplace, how your income streams are going to develop, and what the real investment into the product is going to need to be. That will give you a proper understanding to know that when you build it, they actually will come.

(With apologies, of course, to W.P. Kinsella)

- jordan

Comments