One of the things that I'm fairly good at, is walking people from "Crazy Idea That Will Never Work," through to "Finished Product That People Want."

It tends to be a very long process, and often involves a lot of "trial balloons." I just went through that, in the last couple of years. The project we're realizing, looks absolutely nothing at all about what the CEO originally dreamed up, but everyone that has seen it, loves it.

The trick is to not start off by saying "It'll never work." That slams doors shut, right away.

It's more like, "OK, so let's walk through what we'll need to do, to make it work."

That will often result in changes being made, by the "idea person," as the plans are laid. We will also try to create test harnesses and prototypes. These often end up, with the idea person going "Hmm...it seemed like a good idea, but it doesn't work the way I wanted."

It's slow and painful, but works.

I love this approach. What is your current role that allows you to do that?

In the project I’m on, I’m basically the CTO (sort of meaningless, as I’m the only front end programmer, and also do most of the backend).

I could be a lot more of a pain in the butt than I am, as I have a lot of leverage, but one of my goals is to help others on the team (including a young CEO) to learn how to make ship software.

If I were working on my own, I probably would have shipped, eighteen months ago.

No one is making a dime. It’s a nonprofit effort.

Quite a few companies have innovation incubators/teams, and this is inline with how I have seen them work.

Yes. They have a want. The key is to nail down the need. But they have to be willing.

Most all problems I see are just resource limited in some respect (occasionally its something humanity just doesn't know how to do yet, that's where the edges of science are). It's not something brand new that's never been done or explored, some prior work typically exists.

When someone says "can we..." or spills their idea they've often identified a real need but they often don't seem to do any sort of analysis further than identifying a demand signal. Chances are, you're not the first person to observe the problem and an opportunity to capitalize on it and there may be good reason no one has yet (its economically infeasible given current understanding, resources, and value people see in it).

The trick is to hold their hand and walk them through a feasibility analysis. Given infinite time and money, I'm confident I can arrive at pretty much any solution or at least a useful approximation that's an improvement on where we currently stand, so we start there and walk backwards. How much time do we really have, how much money do we really have. What's your appetite for risk within those bounds. Let's start talking about some tradeoffs of what you want to see and what I think we might be able to actually achieve.

When someone says "can we..." or spills their idea they've often identified a real need but they often don't seem to do any sort of analysis further than identifying a demand signal.

In my experience, they've identified a want. Either their want or a want they think the market has.

It's not until further analysis do they / you / we get to root need(s). This is why (allegedly) so many "IT projects" fail. The client got what they wanted...not what they needed.

> It's more like, "OK, so let's walk through what we'll need to do, to make it work."

Socratic Software development is the way to go.

It's the usual: "I have a great idea for a Startup, now I just need the money to hire some Developers to implement it...". The Winklevoss twins for example come to mind...