How to find the right time for your innovative idea

In his TED Talk, Bill Gross - founder of IdeaLab, identifies timing as the most crucial factor for startup success by ranking hundreds of startups based on five key factors (the other four being timing). team, ideas, business model and funding).

Timing is crucial for startups because it is crucial for innovation in general.

Few would dispute that Charles Darwin was one of the greatest intellectual thinkers and innovators in human history. Yet he was not the only naturalist thinking about evolution in the 19th century.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist, had his own (albeit different) theory in the first half of the century before Darwin published his greatest work on November 24, 1859.

Alfred Russel Wallace is another naturalist who thought about the subject and had his own very similar theory. In fact, after 20 years of thinking and collecting evidence, some people believe that Darwin finally decided to publish his theory after his correspondence with Wallace exactly because he was afraid that Wallace would publish something very similar before him.< /p>

Darwin was one of many thinkers to ride an intellectual wave that resulted in the greatest discovery in biology.

He was the first to crack the code, but one could argue that evolution was in the air in the 19th century. If Darwin didn't exist, then it's quite likely that some other naturalist (or group of people) would have thought of evolution by natural selection anyway, and even in the same time period.

The same laws fully apply to startups in all innovative fields. For example, Tesla's success has been largely possible due to the huge improvement in battery technology brought by the smartphone market as well as a favorable regulatory environment for green technologies due to the wave of environmental concerns. .

Timing is crucial. As the founder of an innovative startup, you ride the waves of market forces. It is a big mistake to try to choose a market where there are currently no big waves.

Of course, good timing is more of an art than a science. Yet there are still ways to increase the likelihood that you'll be in the right place at the right time.

It's important to be at the forefront of a growing technology field and in a place where innovation happens. While evolution was in the air in the 19th century, in the 21st AI, blockchain, genomics, etc. are some of the areas in which great economic and technological energy is accumulating.

Being involved in these areas is by no means a guarantee of success. However, it would greatly increase your chances of connecting the dots and finding new solutions to new problems that arise.

By being at the forefront of a new trend, you position yourself in front of the wave. This is the right place to be if you want to catch it.