Seriously, this list is exhausting to read. It's like the topic sentence for an entire century. I'm going to have to take it a little piece at a time.
There is such a thing as being the first to give a real physical (or commercial) form to an idea, though.
Let's take the "simplified browsing" problem, for example. I worked phone technical support for an internet service provider for a while, and it wasn't long before I saw the need for exactly such a thing. But, it runs deeper than just web browsing and email: there is a huge, absolutely massive number of people out there that need a simpler computer. They don't understand things like firewalls and security, and aren't inclined to ever understand them.
The solution? Take a Linux distribution and hack it heavily; simplify the desktop layout, hide all the settings, and set it up so that immediately after booting, a full-screen web browser appears. The web browser defaults to a very simplified portal page; the user logs in to their "computer" exactly once (on the portal page), and from there they have access to simplified email (which, for example, doesn't have things called "Reply to All"), chat, word processing, and other services.
Thing is, the previous services that have tried to create such a thing have done it wrong; they tried to release their own computer, hardware and all. That doesn't work, at least not now. This would work though because you could sell a CD which would make the installation process a breeze. You wouldn't have a huge initial development cost for the operating system; a good Linux hacker could probably make the necessary changes very quickly.
After, say, 6 months of development by a few people, and with the aid of a crack marketing team, you could start distributing copies of this thing for around $75. You'd be tapping in to an under-served market not just of senior citizens but of every average family that's frustrated at using their computer.
You could even build in a secure remote desktop protocol for the operating system, and make tech support -- if you wanted to offer it -- the easiest it's ever been.
So, there ya go. Probably a hundred-million-dollar idea, with most of the framework. Lots more details, too many to list here.
Got time to build it?
This is a good observation. Anyway, the issue here is, whether that massive number will have some common notion of what the simpler computer actually is.
For those of us that are computer literate, it's hard to imagine that even basic abstract concepts like email are completely foreign to the majority of the population. I would guess that over half of people don't know how to answer the question, "what do you use for a web browser?".
So you have a blank slate, a free pass to design anything you can imagine. If you can deliver it to these people, and if they don't find it intimidating, or hard to learn, or unpredictable, then they'll like it.
So the problem of "simpler browsers" will likely only be solved by solutions that redefine the experience and goal and it will likely be very close to what we now call a smartphone.
Also, I wonder about the browsers that come with game consoles like the Wii, are they any good? They might be easier to use than full-fledged computers?
Even if this were true (which seems extremely unlikely) someone had to think of it first. So there would have been a point when it was possible to have new ideas. How can you be sure the present is not such a point, when we know there were such points in the past?
Sort of like looking at each generation from chimpanzees to humans.
I did not say that people do not have new ideas. That is a blatantly ridiculous statement. I said that worthy ideas have already been had.
My argument comes from looking at literary and philosophical ideas, and my comment was a jest in response to another jest, but there's truth in it. There's a persistent quest for originality in literature, and after some years of chasing that particular ghost I came to the conclusion that it's an illusion. All the great subjects, all the great ideas, have been had already. That doesn't make a book written today less valuable, because what I would add to whichever idea I decide to write about is my own, unique perspective on it. But it means that trying to come up with some completely original idea for a book is pointless - if it's "completely original" it is probably worthless. If ten of thousand years of human civilisation have not yet produced that idea in any form, there's probably a good reason.
Hence my statement that ideas worth having have been had a thousand times already.
So, rather than chasing originality in writing, I think it's more worthwhile to enrich my perspective so that what I add to whatever ancient kernel I might pick is actually worth adding.
Now, extending this to start-up ideas, as you well know, if you have a brilliant idea for a start-up, chances are someone has already had that idea somewhere in the world. If no one has had it at all out of 6 billion people, chances are it's not brilliant, and probably not worth pursuing. Moreover, most great business ideas are not "original", but twists on existing ideas, putting an existing concept into a new perspective. So even the first person to come up with a new twist is still just coming up with a new twist. As with books, though, it doesn't matter whether your idea is original, what matters is what you put into it (the execution, basically). I think this is in agreement with your articles.
Businesses exist to fulfil human needs. The idea of fulfilling human needs is as old as human needs themselves. The ways of doing so are just as old. Social networking, for example, might be a new twist on the idea of helping people make and keep friends, but it's still fulfilling the human need for friendship, something which thousands of other businesses do too.
So, again, rather than striving to come up with a truly original start-up idea, I think it's more worthwhile to hone my ability to take whatever idea I do decide to run with and make it into a working business.
Are you saying that all the proofs to be discovered have been?
The way I hear what you're saying, you found a way out of a trap for yourself (the trap of trying to be original, which just leads round in circles) by deciding that nothing's really original. That sounds like a valuable insight under the circumstances. It doesn't mean that the generalization holds universally, though (which is why you're getting objections to it here). In fact the opposite generalization might be equally true: every great idea has never exactly occurred before.
I'm quite comfortable with the idea (original or not) that opposing concepts can both be true simultaneously. Your opposite generalisation does sound very interesting too. I'm going to write it down in my little idea notebook for further thought some day :-) Thanks!
(Thinking about it now, putting both these statements together appears like it could well need to a very interesting Borges-like story)
You fund many start-ups. How many have come up with a truly original idea? How many have, instead, taken an existing idea and given a new spin to it, or even just taken an existing idea and applied it to a new market? In fact, if you can't express your idea in a few words, is probably not a great start-up idea. And if you can, then it's probably fairly close to an existing idea. "Search engine for parts" (Octoparts). "Job site for start-ups" (Startuply). "Automatic time-management tracking" (RescueTime). "Configurable, hosted e-commerce platform" (Viaweb). "Social news for hackers" (YCNews). All potentially great businesses or worthwhile endeavours, but not because of any originality.
Obviously this doesn't apply to all intellectual fields equally well. It very much depends on your definition of "idea", too. But I think for a definition of idea that maps fairly closely to "start-up ideas" as well as "book/story ideas" or even "wise ideas" - all the good ones are out there for the picking, and have been for eons.
Arriving at this feeling is an unmistakable symptom of being physiologically incapable of creativity. My condolences. On the plus side, most of humanity is in the same boat as you.
Perhaps, but not by me, and not all at the same time. ;)
From André Maurois' preface to Borges' Labyrinths (about Borges):
His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: 'Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.' Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): 'We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.' But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): 'God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.'
I would argue that this is true in one sense only--before anyone had invented the wheel, the wheel still existed. The idea of the wheel had existed the moment matter was created lending the possibility of the wheel to come about. Arguably even before this. However the idea of the wheel was not realized until someone captured that idea. This is the same with any idea, every idea already exists, out there, somewhere.
However, to rearrange the words of the proposed idea, that is to say that "no one has ever had an original", new idea, cannot be true mathematically simply because there are an infinite number of ideas.
The question now becomes two parts
1) Definition of "new ideas", and 2) Whether or not there are any new WORTHY ideas
Response to 1). Interpretation of a new idea greatly limits the concept of having a "new idea". For example, is a walkman the same idea as an iPod? Both are ways to carry music around with you portably and conveniently. Same with a horse and buggy and an automobile. HOWEVER, I would argue that both of these show that an iPod and a car are distinctly new ideas.
Response to 2) This idea greatly underestimates the intellectual power of people. Throughout history there have been worthy, new ideas (air travel, concept of the atom, big bang theory, the internet), how can it possibly be that there are none left?
Overall I really hope that what I believe is true, that there are new worthy ideas to be had. For example there has to be some brilliant man or woman somewhere that will come up with a new idea, or a dumb man or woman that will stumble across one, that will undoubtedly arise from a problem or crisis that arises (ie energy crisis...COME ON PEOPLE, PROVE ME RIGHT!!).