Coincidentally, I just finished watching an Innovation at Google infoq talk where Patrick Copeland started by trying to sell "an idea that could make a billion dollars" in a sealed envelope for $1000. As you might expect, nobody was willing to pay $1000 for such an idea. After reducing the price during the talk, he finally sold the envelope for $20. Google have vast databases of "great ideas" submitted by their many brilliant employees. Copeland argues that these ideas, by themselves, are not particularly valuable.
He further mentioned the pretotyping.org web site and The Pretotyping Manifesto namely:
- innovators beat ideas
- pretotypes beat productypes
- building beats talking
- simplicity beats features
- now beats later
- commitment beats committees
- data beats opinions
Studying the above links should give you a greater appreciation of why you've received such a luke warm response to your "brilliant new idea". To get a more enthusiastic response, you'll need to do some more work. If you lack the technical skills to actually do it, you could follow Palm Pilot pioneer Jeff Hawking's lead and try using a pretotype of your idea for a couple of weeks to simulate the core experience of actually using your proposed new application. Or try to gather some hard data in support of your idea.
