Do you aspire to become an
entrepreneur; a business owner?
May be you are consistently in a
brainstorming session to discover
that proverbial great idea that will
take the world by surprise before
you launch your business.

Like gold, great idea is precious and
not readily available. The skill
required for Gold prospecting (the
act of searching for new gold
deposit) is active and not passive. A
lot of research, speculation and
technology (metal detector etc) goes
into the process. Yet most aspiring
entrepreneurs expect to discover
gold passively without first of all
going for the search.

It is common conception that you
need a great idea to start a business
that will become successful,
especially in the 21 century – the
information age. The belief holds
that those who launch highly
successful businesses usually begin
first and foremost with a brilliant
idea (technology, product, market
potential) and then ride the growth
curve of an attractive product life
circle.
Aspiring entrepreneurs rely on this
belief to idly await that moment of
epiphany when the light bulb turns
on, and the proverbial great idea
pops up, before they take the step
to get started. As compelling as it is,
this belief does not reflect in most
successful companies; and if relied
upon, often result in
procrastination, self limitation and
latency.
Procter and Gamble started as a
simple soap and candle maker,
Motorola started as a struggling road
side battery eliminator repair
business. Great idea is like gold; to
discover it you must get out there
and start digging.

Below are examples of
entrepreneurs and companies that
bent the concept of ‘Great idea’
being the essential tool to start a
successful business.
Note that this article is not meant to
dispute the importance of having a
good idea and a plan before starting
a business. The point here is that it
doesn’t have to be a reason for
inaction. As an aspiring
entrepreneur, you have to remove
every negative orientation and
ideology that is holding back from
taking action.





1. Bill Hewlett and Dave
Packard – HP
On August 23, 1937, two graduate
engineers in their early twenties
with no substantial business
experience met to discuss the
founding of a new company. They
had no clear idea what the company
would make. They only knew that
they wanted to start a company in a
broadly defined field of electronic
engineering .
They brainstormed a wide range of
initial products and market
possibilities, but had no compelling
‘Great idea’ that served as the
founding inspiration for the
fledgling company.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard
decided to first start a company and
then figure out what they would
make. They started trying anything
that might get them out of the
garage and pay the light bills.
According to Bill Hewlett:
When I talk to business
schools occasionally,
the professor of
management is
devastated when I say
that we didn’t have any
plan when we started –
we were just
opportunistic. We did
anything that would
bring in a nickel…
The company struggled and
stumbled along for nearly a year
before it got its first big sale – 8
audio oscilloscopes. It was until
early 1940s Hewlett and Packard –
HP – got a boost from war contracts.





2. Masaru Ibuka – Sony
When Masaru Ibuka founded Sony
in August 1945, he had no specific
product idea. In fact, Ibuka and his
seven initial employees had a
brainstorming session – after
starting the company – to decide
what product to make. For weeks
they tried to figure out what kind of
business this new company could
enter to make money to operate.
They considered a wide range of
possibilities, from sweetening bean-
paste soup to miniature golf
equipment. Sony’s first product
attempt (a simple rice cooker) failed
to work properly and its first
significant product (a tape recorder)
failed in the marketplace.
The company kept itself alive in the
early days by stitching wires on
cloth to make crude but sellable
heating pads. With the Sony Pioneer
Spirit, Sony had grown to become a
global leader and manufacturer of
electronic products.





3. Sam Walton – Wal-Mart
Sam Walton also started without a
great idea. He went into business
with nothing other than the desire
to work for himself and a little bit
knowledge and a lot of passion
about retailing. He didn’t wake up
one day and say, “I have this great
idea around which I’m going to
start a company.”
He started in 1945 with a single Ben
Franklin franchise five-and-dime
store. Walton built incrementally,
step by step, from that single store
until the ‘great idea’ of rural
discount popped out as a natural
evolutionary step almost two
decades after he started his
company.
In his words:
“ Somehow over the
years folks have gotten
the impression that
Wal-Mart was
something that I
dreamed up out of the
blue as a middle aged
man, and that it was
just this great idea that
turned into an over-
night success. But our
first Wal-mart store
was totally an
outgrowth of everything
we’d been doing since
1945 – another
experiment. And like
most over-night
successes, it was about
20 years in the
making .”





4. Igvar Kamprad – IKEA
Ingvar Kamprad started buying and
selling matches and pencils at an
early age. At age 17, with a cash
reward from his father, for doing
well in school, he founded IKEA. He
continued to expand his business to
a variety of goods, including wallets,
watches, jewelery and stockings. In
1947, Kamprad introduced furniture
into the IKEA product line. He later
focused his business on furniture
making.
One day one of his employees, Gillis
Lundgren was having difficulty
fitting a table for transport. After
several unsuccessful trials, out of
frustration he shouted: “Oh God!
Let’s pull off the legs and put them
underneath!” That incident gave
Kamprad the ‘great idea’ that
birthed to a low cost product line…
furniture designed to be sold
unassembled. This established IKEA
as a cost leader in furniture
business worldwide for its
innovative and stylish designs..






5. Mrs Ogunwale – Baker
Bitters
The list will not be complete
without an example from home.
Mrs. Ogunwale, maker of Baker
Water and Baker Bitters told her
story, on how she discovered a
business opportunity and quickly
shifted focus from her initial
passion-oriented business. Mrs.
Ogunwale was passionate about
catering. She won a deep freezer
after a vocational training program,
and started her catering business,
somewhere close to Lagos toll-gate.
She also sells cold ‘sachet-water’
with her freezer.
One hot afternoon, a young boy, one
of the hawkers along the
expressway, approached her to help
him freeze his bag of sachet water,
which has gone hot from the
scotching sun. She reluctantly
agreed on the terms that he’ll pay
ten naira for the bag. By the end of
the day, she made sixty naira doing
business with the little boy – more
than what she makes from her
catering business. She went from
selling single sachet to selling
chilled bags of sachet water with
extra profit.
More and more customers
patronised her new business until
she had more customers than she
could handle. She quickly
abandoned catering to focus on
sachet water business. She bought
new freezers (up to 7) and rented a
bigger space. Much later, she went
ahead to start her own sachet water
company. Today her company
produces bottle water, Baker bitters
and other products.
Several such examples abound
locally and internationally of
businesses that started with no clear
idea of what product or service the
company will offer. They had the
passion to do business, even when
they were not sure what business
that would be.
Some even began with outright
failure. But the important thing is
that they got started, and took
advantage of the opportunities that
crossed their path.
These businesses and several others
like them demystifies the widely
help myth of a far-seeing
entrepreneur who envisions a great
idea and founds his company to
capitalize on a visionary product
idea or market insight.
Lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs:
If you desire to start and build a
business but have not yet taken the
dive because you don’t have a ‘great
idea’, be encouraged to lift from
your shoulders the burden of the
great-idea myth.
Don’t wait for the perfect time. Most
often, the great idea will only pop
out when you are in the journey,
tinkering and stumbling along in
the field. Take that first step, get
started and learn what you need on
the ‘go’.

good information. Good work OP more data to your phone

Nasiru Ebuka Sony

These lot only 'seized' chances, and believe me, such chances doesn't come around always.

Nothing beats working on a worthy idea. Knowing where you are driving to and giving it your very best shots.

Fantastic post!
Thumbs up!!