Nathaniel Whittemore has an interesting poston the balance between ideas and execution in the context of a startup (which should also apply to any reasonably scoped feature team). I've always maintained that execution is the key ingredient simply because the barrier to entry - the cost - of an idea is a lot less than the cost of execution. For any product that is released you will hear a thousand people claiming to have had that idea (I claim blogging and The Matrix). Execution requires that you do something about it. This means you have enough passion in the idea - you believe it will change the world for a significant part of the population, and that you have enough confidence and professionalism to see the idea through to a satisfactory conclusion (which may be one of - success, transformation to some other idea or failure for the right reasons).
It is interesting to speculate that many people claim ideas they 'believe' will solve problems that, if they didn't execute on them, would indicate a fundemantal moral failing worthy of incarceration.
The process of execution is where modifications to the idea, or completely new ideas come from.
There is an interesting inversion to this discussion which can be witnessed whenever a consumer claims a product to be dumb due to omission - 'why didn't they think of ..?' More often than not, the producer did have that idea but the constraints on execution made it impossible, at least in this iteration, or the did it and it actually wasn't such a good idea afterall!
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