ABSTRACT
Finding a unique or new angle can be very difficult indeed and it is easy to feel daunted by this task. There is no easy route to finding this new angle on the type of service you intend to offer. It is a question of relentlessly looking for opportunities and then discussing these with people who you believe will be able to give you an objective view and some good advice. It is just not possible to know in advance what will actually work. Some apparently good ideas that have been really well researched turn out to be failures and ideas that have been thought of as ‘crackpot’ have actually been financial winners. It is just not possible to foresee the future. To emphasize this point:
5.2 Even world famous experts get it wrong! I list here a number of comments made by experts who either accepted traditional orthodox views which could have stood in the way of really great projects or who just rejected new ideas out of hand. Thus in 1943 Thomas Watson Sr, the then chairman of IBM, rejected the notion of the company become involved in computers. His historic comment was ‘I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.’ Of course it is only fair to say that at that particular time computers were involved in doing only large and tedious calculations for the military. Nonetheless visionaries like Alan Turning had already noted what computers could potentially offer as far back as the 1930s.
