29 Oct 2014

This is the transcript of a speech I made this week at the smartfuturelondon conference How to turn a good idea into an investment What makes a good idea?  If everyone agrees that change is inevitable and ‘it’s only a matter of time’, it always seems to take a very long time. Having heard yesterday’s presentation on smart energy – hands up if anyone thinks that’s a bad idea – I suspect that a common drag on the development of really good ideas is that everyone wants a piece. I was watching The Man With The Golden Gun on TV the other day. It was made in 1974 when the world was suffering the first OPEC oil shock. So in the tradition of the James Bond series to be topical, they shoved in a sub-plot in which the Golden Gun Guy steals the Solex Agitator, a device that turns the sun’s rays into energy.  What a great idea. Someone should try that. When mobile payments were agreed to be a good idea in 1997, there were more than 100 companies represented in the first mobile forum. That year, Coca Cola built a vending machine that accepted payment from a Nokia phone. Around 2005 I attended a presentation about mobile payment at which someone said that there was a Coca Cola vending machine in Helsinki. Everybody was trying to get a piece of mobile payments – and it was all taking a very long time. Sometimes, great ideas are just too early. Twenty years ago, Larry Ellison of Oracle thought that the PC was an absurd device, being limited by its own processing power and memory. “Put it on the internet” he said. So Oracle launched what we would now call the first netbook. Unfortunately, the internet was too slow at the time. The Oracle NC failed. But one of Ellison’s managers thought it was a great idea. He was Marc Benioff and he left to found Salesforce.com in 1999. It is now the reference business cloud computing company and has a market cap of $37 billion or 7x forecast revenues. The best and most valuable ideas seem to come from nowhere and often evolve...