Great ideas, it's generally assumed, can change the course of history, or at least the course of business and technology. If you build a better mousetrap, as the saying goes, the world will beat a path to your door. And so it has often seemed to be, from Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs to the Google guys.

Yet as I read a story this weekend about the bitterness of a young Harvard graduate who contends that he, and not Mark Zuckerberg, is the true inventor of Facebook, I was reminded once again: ideas are overrated. Or rather, they are rarely of great value in and of themselves. It's all in the execution.

This is a point that I often make to aspiring entrepreneurs, who tend to be obsessed with the greatness of their idea and worried about how to protect it. Granted, there are from time to time genuine breakthrough concepts where secret technology is the key – the original Xerox machine is a good example – but most great technological successes these days are not about that at all.

Microsoft, as everyone knows by now, did not invent personal computer operating systems, but rather figured out the business structure and marketing dynamics of the emergent personal computer world. Yahoo! began as a simple index of websites – no big idea there at all really, except to see earlier than most that finding things on the internet would be a big business.

Google did invent a new way of doing search, and that is fundamentally the reason it's so successful. But the business end of the Google machine is powered by someone else's idea – the contextual ad network, generally considered to have been invented by Bill Gross – and many of Google's more recent activities are notable for their obviousness. Create a digital database of all the books in the world? Online spreadsheets? Video distribution over the internet? Like I said, it's all in the execution.

I've never met Mark Zuckerberg, and I haven't the slightest idea what went on between him and the several other parties that now claim he stole their idea. But if you think about it, there is nothing particularly brilliant about the idea of Facebook in and of itself. An online network where people can meet, socialise and share their interests? That's an idea that's been around since the beginning of the internet. Anyone remember The Well?

What Zuckerberg did, and what most successful tech entrepreneurs do, is take a fairly obvious idea and do a brilliant job of defining, refining and implementing it. With businesses like Facebook and eBay and Craigslist, where so much of the value lies in the fact that lots of people use them, it's often hard to tell exactly what made them take off. But plenty of people had the basic ideas. Only a very few have empires.

Putting the value of ideas into proper perspective is important for a couple of reasons. For one, aspiring entrepreneurs can miss a lot of opportunities by being too protective. Time and money spent on lawyers and non-disclosure agreements at the earliest stages is mostly a waste. Ideas, remember, as opposed to the expression or implementation of ideas, cannot be protected from a legal standpoint. Keeping an idea secret means missing opportunities to learn from others and improve it.

Second, putting the value on the idea, rather than the brutally hard work of successful execution, tends to warp people's understanding of how innovation functions. I often hear people say, referring to a successful new product or service, 'jeez, I had that idea too, if only I had acted on it.' The implication is that success is about moving fast on sudden inspiration. I think it's usually just the opposite: plodding away on something, day after day and year after year, until you get it right.

The ongoing fights over patents are also a reflection of the cult of the idea: too many patents are really a basic idea, or concept, accompanied by a general and superficial means of execution, and it makes no sense to punish a company that successfully brings something difficult to market in favour of someone who knew how to write a good patent around a big idea.

It's nice to think that you can make your mark, or at least build a company, with a great insight or two. The reality, alas, is much more prosaic.

---

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard