It would be interesting to put together a list of these "good idea, but poor execution" ideas. It would probably be a good list of things to try again.
Let's put it another way. When you say:
>It would be interesting to put together a list of these "good idea, but poor execution" ideas.
I read:
>It would be interesting to put together a list of these "execution plans but poor execution" ideas.
There is absolutely no way to separate out the "good idea" from the "good idea but poor execution" because business is the art of execution.
But maybe I'm crazy.
You can patent entire industries and fundamental advances. The hard part is just choosing what to focus on, that you can actually do in 1860 starting with $1,000,000 and maybe the patent system (though it's probably unfair that you're using a time machine - this is likely quite immoral as you're not the true inventor of anything.)
And then doing it.
In other words: the outcome of the game is about execution. But what you're executing is idea. The two go hand in hand. You have a real chance to become worth 2015$ 1 trillion within the 20 years - or generate a one-million fold return on the million. You can be worth as much as entire continents. But you have to do it right.
For starters, you have to be someone whose brain can ship those technical ideas back to 1860 in one piece. This is quite similar to someone with an idea today. Not everyone qualifies.
Put another way, you could probably make exactly the same amount of money, if not more, with a "back to the future 2" scenario where you had zero ideas, but had a chart of various events that you could wager on or invest based on.
When we look at it from that perspective, it's only execution - can you correctly execute about the information you already have.
Soooo - yeah, it's not a great analogy. In general, having a perfect knowledge of what happens makes for bad analogies.
Why this is a workable analogy is because this really is similar to the position that founders with technical ideas are in. They have this vision that something can more or less work - but even if it does they still have to execute on it. That's my point.
Everything you dictate in this revised game is 100% guaranteed to work, because you're reading it straight out of technical manuals for the scientists who build these things today. But that still doesn't make a company that manufacture these things pop out of thin air. You can transfer a very large part of a $1 trillion in R&D back in time -- the ideas; but you won't suddenly have a company as a result. Someone still has to make it all and sell it all.
As an example, even if Babbage had invented modern transistors, he didn't "almost" create Intel and IBM. These companies as such are quite separate from the idea.