Okay, so you have an idea, now what. How do you know if this idea is going to be any good as a business concept? This is the question that a lot of the entrepreneurs are faced with, but not all good ideas are good business concepts.

There are three categories that ideas can fall into; Revelation ideas, Evolution ideas and Iteration ideas.

Revelation ideas or ideas that are new; this could be innovation and technology, new inventions in science and discovery, or news stories or ideas in the arts. It is my experience that very few entrepreneurial ideas fall into this category, even though the entrepreneur himself is convinced that the concept is a revelation.

Evolution ideas are ideas that have come through and evolution process from other ideas. Most business ideas are concepts that have been seen elsewhere and that have just been involved in two a new reforms or a new look. Thus we see a lot of thin in technology, Web concepts and apps. These ideas are not necessarily bad but should be described as such and not as new.

Iteration ideas are ideas that use existing technology or concepts and combine them to come up with a new business solution. A good example of this is taking a GPS locator, which already existed for a number of years and combine that with a mobile phone to offer geolocation and direction solutions to the end user. This is a mashup of ideas that create a new solution.

Understanding into which category your new business concept falls will give you a good understanding on how to present it to the market and represents it in a business plan. This still does not mean that it is a feasible idea, this needs to be assessed separately and non-emotionality by the business. We have seen many good ideas that seem wonderful on paper and exciting when presented, but still do not match up to the feasibility assessment.

In our next post we will explore the feasibility assessment and give you a chance to take your business idea through this assessment that will give you a score based on market experience and fact and not emotion and hype.