Opening a restaurant is a bad idea in my view. Long hours, hard work, fickle customers and poor ROI. That being said, I’d take a well run restaurant over a “killer idea for the next social networking site”.

Of course, you can take the extreme view of a truly terrible idea that would be harmful if implemented (no matter how well it’s implemented, I’m not interested in soylent green), but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here.

I’m not sure if I’d view the value of ideas as their ability to inspire either. Is Google the top search engine because the page rank algorithm “inspired” its engineers? Naw. Its the top search engine because the page rank algorithm is a damn good way to retrieve relevant information. It’s POSSIBLE to build a business on this foundation (e.g. The Body Shop), but I wouldn’t generalize this perspective as far as you do.

Interesting comment on an old post, thanks!

Where the real value of ‘ideas’ lies is in their ability to inspire people to want to implement them.