The phrase “IDEA has no value” has lost much of its context and is ambiguous.

Examples of context-supplemented

  • Ideas without execution are economically worthless, so it is difficult to sell the idea by itself at a high price.
  • Ideas that are not registered as patents are worthless as property rights, so you can’t charge them with theft.
  • An idea that the person thinks is a good idea, but in reality has not developed at all, has little chance of developing even if it is kept in the chest and believed to be a good idea, so it is better to talk about it with others and use it as material for generating new ideas.
    • This isn’t “worthless”, it’s “low value”.
    • Is an idea worthwhile or not?” is False dichotomy a futile argument.
  • Ideas that are merely untested hypotheses that “might solve the problem this way” are less valuable than solutions that have been verified to solve the problem

relevance - Value of Ideas - Ideas and scarcity value - The story says that people who generate only a few ideas estimate the value of their ideas too high. - Generalization: The ability to produce X is more valuable than X itself.


This page is auto-translated from /nishio/アイデアには価値がない using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.