The experience of getting a new idea is wonderful. What follows can also be fun and exciting, when you have a plan and know what it takes to carry your idea from conception to reality.

      What does it take to give bright ideas their start? It's true that creativity and inventiveness are among the qualities required, but being able to dream is only a small piece of the success. Dreaming a dream is one thing, but bringing the dream to market is another dimension entirely. Business is all about making money, which means the bottom line is the bottom line.

      The best way to prepare to launch a new idea is to become a "Know-it-all" - it is essential to be an expert on your subject. This means educating yourself about all aspects of it.

      Educating yourself needs to be both open-ended and focused, to provide the freedom necessary to explore unexpected leads. Success at this stage often depends on how open-minded you are. If you enter the education process with even some preconceptions, you are likely to miss important learnings. Preconceptions have a way of limiting your vision to what you already know.

      Adopt a spirit of adventure about learning new things. If you fear learning new information because it might undermine your idea, then you will miss major insights.

      There is good news in everything you learn, if only your vision is broad and clear enough to see it. Take what might be the worst possible thing you learn – your idea has already been done and patented by another company. At this point you may be devastated. By looking for the positive in this, you might see —

    — How a joint venture with the company holding the patent could be an even bigger idea
    — How you can use the learnings and experience from working on this project to benefit your company in other ways.

      When you want to see the benefits, you will see them. This attitude is crucial to your success at this early stage.

      Focus also helps the education process, but there is a vast amount of information available today on virtually any subject. You can get so caught up in the research and discovery phase that you lose perspective and fail to initiate action.

      In general, you'll need to start by getting background information about the following topics —

    — Your company's strategy and goals
    — General business and economic conditions
    — Your industry
    — Your market
    — Your idea

      This information will help you form some opinions about the overall climate and how your idea might fare given current conditions. As you become more convinced of its potential, you can delve deeper into specifics that will ultimately become part of a formal business plan. Everything you discover will contribute to your idea's potential for success.

      Done right, the education process greatly enhances the probability of success. Look at education as the foundation of the building process. If your understandings and learnings are not solid at this stage, then at minimum you will waste considerable time and more likely you will make weak recommendations that, if implemented, will have a higher than necessary probability of failure.