First you document your idea. You should be comprehensive, but that doesn't mean you have to produce a doctoral thesis length plan. Rather you want to make sure you have touched all the different things that have to happen to succeed. Then, you evaluate your approach. The goal here isn't to figure out if your idea is good or bad, but rather to begin to figure out what are some of its weakest elements.

We fool ourselves into thinking that the spreadsheets that capture our financial projections are something different than what they are.

Think about how you will start and where you will go. Get the head with logic and the heart with visuals or stories. And think about your core customer and all the other stakeholders as well.

I've always found that working through ideas in written form really changes the thinking.

History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that's penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational.

The sad truth is as difficult as the first mile can be for entrepreneurs, it is doubly tough inside most large companies as innovators can face some significant headwinds.

Anytime you see a constrained market, where consumption is limited to those who have special skills or are wealthy, that signals an opportunity for innovation.