This was an answer written to LinkedIn Answers.

I have an innovation model that should be very helpful to you. It involves five key ideas:
1. The innovation champion must fully understand and communicate the idea.
2. The users or buyers of the innovation must be able to understand what it does.
3. The team that produces the innovation must be developed, funded and resourced.
4. No innovation comes perfectly formed, there is always a hiding hand. The best ideas must be used.
5. Finally the innovation must produce the intended benefit for the users or buyers.

First of all talking to people about your idea is essential and important to you. As you develop the ability to talk about the idea many new concepts will come to you. For instance you will notice the lack of interest that most people show. This will force you to find better ways to explain your idea.

Usually when you have a GREAT idea you can't give it away. The reason is simple. If you have a genuine innovation, other people are not in your "concept space" so they don't understand what you have to offer, even if you explain it clearly. (Actually in the beginning even if you CAN explain it clearly. In the beginning that's never the case, you have to learn how to explain it in terms that other people understand.)

If there are patentable aspects of your idea, those need to be ring fenced, temporarily, but otherwise your idea need not be a secret.

Despite the fear innovators have, your ideas CANNOT be stolen by someone else. You cannot transplant your thinking engine into someone else's head. If you've really done your own work on this idea you have lots of knowledge that comes from developing your idea, from all the mistakes you made, from the effort of nursing this idea from a vague concept to a viable business concept, that do not exist in the head of any rival.

When you explain your idea to someone else they only have whatever you tell them plus THEIR OWN IDEAS. Unless they have been working very hard on the concept themselves they won't come close to what you are proposing.

The people who worry most about having an idea stolen probably don't have any real background in developing the idea themselves. In other words "I stole it" and I'm worried someone else will “steal it from me” too.

You should study the Veech Innovation Model.
See the links below.
There is also an Innovation Wiki:
And an Innovation Network on Ryze:
Links:

* http://www.ate.co.nz/innovation/veechsuccessmodel.html
* http://innovation.wikispaces.com/
* http://veech-network.ryze.com/

john Stephen Veitch
Monday, March 12, 2007