I sometimes explain it like this:

"Consider the following idea; there is a billion dollars[1] worth of Gold sitting in one mountain in the Sierra Nevada range just south of Lake Tahoe."

This isn't theory, you can read the US Geological survey reports, you can do your own assay. There is a billion dollars sitting there for the taking.

That the gold is there is the "idea", that you have to process an entire mountain (roughly 50 cubic miles of granite) to extract that gold is "execution."

Now here is the punchline. There is no place left in that mountain where you can just dig a hole and pull out a profitable amount of gold. That is because all the ideas for getting the gold out 'easily' have already been tried.

There are not a lot of genuinely new ideas, but there are new versions of an idea when things change in a fundamental way. If someone created something like a Tunnel Boring Machine which could suck in granite, pull out gold, and return the results (with equivalent structural integrity :-)) as it passed through. That would make getting the gold out of the mountain more feasible.

[1] This used to be a 100 million dollars worth of gold when it was $100/oz, now at > $1000 it is more than a billion dollars. And like oil, which cost more than $50 a barrel to remove was 'worthless' in the 70's is now profitable in the > $100 a barrel days of oil.

I wrote two similar/relevant articles about the same phenomenon here: http://krrishd.github.io/blog/post/no-one-is-going-to-steal-... , http://krrishd.github.io/blog/post/what-really-powers-innova...

I don't mean to nitpick, but according to your table, an idea is worth anywhere from -$1 to $20. :)

My first reaction is, "if that..."

My second is, "Isn't this old news already?" Are serious entrepreneurs still running around asking people to sign NDAs rather than bragging about the caliber of their founding teams?

The anecdote I usually trot out is this: back in 1990, there was a company in Ohio, called Book Stacks Unlimited, if memory serves. They had the books.com internet address.

Books.com sold books by allowing one to telnet to their server, and picking items from their catalog - on a terminal screen, natch ;). They had reasonable shipping fees, and used only recyclable materials, namely crumpled brown paper for padding. (It did not work too well versus the foam peanuts more common at the time.)

A few years later Amazon was all over the place claiming "a river of one million books", and becoming synonymous with internet book-shopping. The books.com domain now belongs to Barnes&Noble.