You don’t have to be the most creative person in the world to come up with the best idea ever. And even if you do come out with a ground breaking idea, do you think you can implement it and most importantly, market it successfully? Coming out with an idea is not difficult but coming out with a good idea is not easy too.

That’s why some businesses especially the big boys don’t tend to come out with their original ideas. They steal other people’s ideas or buy from them. Well, not many buy actually, most of them prefer to steal or …improvise. For example, Apple did not come out with the first MP3 player of the world. They did come out with the first IPod in the world and the first ITunes (which is pretty similar to Napster, except you need to pay). What they did is to capture the heart of the consumers and to see what they need – performance and beauty. That is why IPod is such a big hit. It sounds better than most MP3 players and it looks a lot prettier than its competitors. Same idea, different implementation and marketing plan.

What about Google? They are definitely not the first company to come out with a search engine. We have Lycos, Yahoo, AltaVista (which..somehow..disappeared) and the terribly unsuccessful MSN Search. You might argue that Google was the engine behind Yahoo’s search engine…but that’s a totally different story. What matters here is who came out with the idea first? Maybe it’s Yahoo and maybe it’s Google…but from what I can see now, Google is far more successful than Yahoo because they redesigned the search engine and added a lot of goodies to the users. More features, better and more optimized results, but all built from the same idea.

Another example, our very own Air Asia. Are they the one who came out with the idea of budget airline? Definitely not. There are already other such ideas being implemented in the world but mainly in US and Europe. What Air Asia did was to take the idea and reimplement it in this region because nobody else has done this before. And they become a very big hit in a very short amount of time. Same idea, same implementation, different location and different timing.

From the above examples, you can see that you don’t really need to come out with a good or even great idea. Because it’s not that easy. If you can come out with one, then kudos to you but if you can’t, don’t blame yourself and it’s not the end of the world. You can still start a successful business and have a successful product. At the end of the day, it’s not just about the idea, but the way you market it, the way you position your product, the overall implementation and the timing.

So for those people who always say “Why do you want to start a business when you don’t even have a great idea? Come out with one first before you plan anything!”, maybe it’s time to reposition your stand?