As most readers here would agree, ideas are worth almost nothing but executing on them is the value.
And yet we are still confronted with NDAs just to listen to "Facebook for Farmers" pitches.
Perhaps it's better to say those entrepreneurs are afraid of their implementers leaving with all of the domain specific knowledge; believing that it would allow them re-create the product and outmaneuver the entrepreneur.
Of course it's never really that easy, but so few fears are rational.
Half the reason I want increased computer science education is because I'd like this madness distributed across more people.
I went in for an in-person interview at a company. At the end of the interview process, the interviewer let me know I hadn't gotten the job, but told me I should connect with him on LinkedIn because he and his friend had a great business idea that needed a developer.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, since I've had interviewers reach out to me after I've been rejected to say the same thing. It seemed exceedingly strange that I was solicited to work on another project in person by the interviewer during the interview process.
You can get a new financial advisor. My _wife_ wants me to build her an iPhone app.
Some people really like their financial advisors!
We once had a guy whose first slide was just an NDA in tiny font that he actually read aloud to 50 people. I was in the back of the room with some of the other staff and I had to step out because I was laughing too much.
In practice though, most of the time your idea is too small or too risky to be on the radar of those organizations.
A bit like how when you wake up a dream you had makes perfect sense until you try to describe it to someone else.
The statement that ideas don't matter, only execution matters, can only apply among sets of trivial ideas that don't change the landscape. Yes, if you want to make Facebook for Farmers, that's an idea that is completely interchangeable with hundreds of other equally trivial ideas, and it doesn't matter which one you choose so much as how well you execute on it. But if you have a genuinely significant idea, something that can fundamentally alter the landscape or advance humanity, then execution is secondary, and, in fact, lots of different people or organizations could implement it. That isn't to say that you can't screw up the execution and fail thereby, but the limiting factor to success is different for trivial ideas vs significant ideas: there are thousands of trivials and the major factor of success is how well you execute the one you choose; there are few significants, and the major factor in success is having them first/getting to market first. If you think you have one of the latter, NDAs might make sense.
Ideas + experimentation to validate them + implementation is where its at. An idea by itself without execution is a fantasy.
In my usage, 'information' describes patterns that exist in the universe, and 'ideas', at least loosely, describes the apprehension of one or more of those inherent patterns by an intelligent mind. An idea is the mental perception or conception of external information. Information might be fundamental to the universe, but ideas are fundamental to intelligent minds, being the lens through and by which we perceive everything.
My point, though, was mostly that it's false that ideas have no value - I wasn't trying to make the complete opposite error and say that execution has no value. Of course to make something happen in the world you need execution as well as something to execute.
I'm not arguing that execution has no value. Obviously ideas, particularly business/startup ideas, must be acted on effectively in order to become real. But: ideas are logically prior to execution; the ability to conceive of abstract ideas is a far larger developmental step than is the subsequent ability to act on those ideas; and being able to have abstract ideas is the thing that most definitively separates homo sapiens from all other species on Earth.