that's quite an arrogant thing to say and probably will rub a lot of people the wrong way.

but let's give it the benefit of a doubt.

Let's say that there is a quality greatness separate from the qualities of likely to succeed, easy to implement, monetizable and so forth

where idiotic is concerned I would wonder if this is a quality separate from physically impossible, illegal, has obvious undesirable side effects? Is being guaranteed of business failure for an idea you hope to build a business on make that idea idiotic?

Now once we have this question as to what exactly comprises greatness and idiocy in ideas we can say there are many intelligent and successful people who have thought an idea was brilliant and would be hugely successful (two qualities we have separated), which idea then resoundingly failed.

The Segway comes to mind. I remember when that was first revealed, I thought hey this thing is genius, amazing. I sent it round the office, everyone had a big laugh about how stupid it was, including our lead designer who went into a big tirade about how people have bikes (in Denmark), Americans should just get bikes, they were not going to redesign their cities to accommodate the Segway if they don't redesign to accommodate the bicycle etc. etc.

So, was the Segway an idiotic idea, a brilliant idea, or a mediocre one?

I submit it was both brilliant and idiotic.

Our designer who saw the idiocy did not see how we would end up with the computerized autobalancing of the Segway in everything (except evidently bikes), how we would have autobalancing electric scooters, skateboards etc.

the people who saw the technical brilliance of the Segway did not realize how it was just not going to be a successful consumer product.

So - would you have judged the Segway as Brilliant or idiotic or just mediocre, and why?

on edit: clarification, fixed some grammar