Idea development is pretty hard when it comes to making one purely for money. If it was an idea for a game I’d probably have an easier time coming up with one (I can hear Emma laughing at me) but when it comes to business other factors come to play. One of the biggest problems is that I have little to no business experience so I barely know what those factors are until I bump into them through trial and error. The two biggest things I’ve seen come up in our group is cost efficiency and viability of the product itself.

A good idea would be a well researched one. By doing both past and present research one could know problems older companies faced as well as what their going to face presently. For example if one were to just do past research he wouldn’t know about any current trends occurring like business opportunities on the web. On the other hand, if someone were to just do present research he might make mistakes older companies made. Another advantage to present research is knowing what your competition is. If you were able to read that a current trend was profitable then it wouldn’t be strange that another company has already been made with a similar idea. You can of course try to compete with the company but your product would have have to been generally more well received through various means such as higher quality and better advertising. That puts a lot more work if your company is just a start-up. This is also why having a unique idea is important.

One business that I find interesting is Oculus with their Rift. I’m of course more interested in the product itself but it turned out to be so well researched that it took off well as a business. The founder keeps holding off the release of a commercial product because he’s activiley trying to avoid past mistakes older VR products made by releasing a product that doesn’t completely captivate customers at a reasonable price. I don’t think their making much profit with the Rifts themselves but their definitely making enough money to make progress towards their collective goal in virtual reality.