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I’m doing a piece of research with U of T that looks at where good business ideas come from and it’s making me look back at some of the very bad business ideas I’ve had over many years. It seems that age doesn’t prevent me from having bad ideas.

Several years ago I decided to try to solve the problem of strategy execution that bedevils many companies. This was a problem that I had had when I was CEO of Synamics. We could come up with strategies (whether they were good or not is another matter) but I felt we fell short in their execution. At the time I wished I had software to help keep track of whether my strategy was being executed effectively or not but I never got around to creating it.

Fast forward a few years and I kept seeing articles, many of them in the Harvard Business Review that reported that strategy execution is the biggest problem in business today. Even polls of CEOs will confirm that strategy execution is their biggest problem. So I figured, this is a problem that I had as a CEO and HBR says that this is the biggest problem in business today, so maybe this is a good idea for a business.

‘They’ say that when you’re starting a business you should look for a problem to solve, not create a product that goes in search of a market. So here I was, trying to solve a well documented problem. But was it successful? No, not even close. I teamed up with Mike Tobias at Mercanix to launch software and services to address problems in strategy execution and we bombed.

And when I say bombed, I mean that we couldn’t even find anyone to talk to. We went out to the market aggressively but met blank stares. I’ve spent some time analyzing what we did wrong and in the process I’ve learned a lot about launching new products. What I discovered when I did the analysis was that there really isn’t a market for what we created. But wait a second, this is documented as the biggest problem in business today but there is no market for a solution?

Well as it turns out, most companies haven’t assigned the generic function of strategy execution to anyone. (If you want to check this out, take a look at how many of your LinkedIn contacts mention strategy execution in their bios. According to my stats there are 100 people doing strategic planning for every one that is doing any strategy execution.) Most companies don’t have any one individual responsible for strategy execution as a job function. Instead they say that everyone is responsible.

So when no one person is responsible for something there is no one looking to buy software and services, even if the problem is the biggest one the company is experiencing. And with no one responsible for buying solutions, there is no one to talk to when you call up a company. So there is no market and you’ve come up with a bad idea.

It’s obviously not enough then, to base a company around a personal need or even around published problems. And if these aren’t enough of a source for an idea, then I’m trying to find out exactly where good ideas come from. The research I’m doing is telling me a lot but I thought I would ask the question in case any of you can add to the conversation. If you have any feedback, let me know. Where have your good business ideas come from?