The Danger of One Big Idea

read on Forbes

It often starts with a flash of certainty. A leadership team huddles in a glass-walled conference room, riding the high of a breakthrough. They’ve found what they believe is their next big business idea. The mood is electric. The markers squeak across the whiteboard. Heads nod, voices overlap. In moments like these, no one in the room wants to ask, “But what else could it be?”

Right now, leaders across industries are in that same place, trying to turn big new opportunity spaces into viable businesses. A healthcare executive is exploring how AI could deliver virtual care to patients. A strategy chief at a food company is looking for ways to break into health and wellness. A head of innovation at a media company is imagining the next generation of user-generated content.

Some of these efforts will spark whole new businesses. Others will fizzle away. And in those earliest stages, one factor will matter far more than most people realize: multiplicity. Success will come to the team that’s figured out more than one way to win.

The Cautionary Tale of Quibi

Most people don’t remember Quibi. In 2018, it was one of the most hyped startups in the world. Industry veterans Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman promised to reinvent entertainment with short, Hollywood-quality videos. Their ideal use case would be people watching content on their phones while commuting to work. Investors poured in nearly $2 billion. The press couldn’t stop talking about it.

But there was only one idea at the heart of Quibi, and everything hinged on that single bet. No alternate formats. No different audience segments. No varied business models. When the pandemic hit and the commuting use case vanished, the grand vision unraveled almost instantly. Six months after launch, Quibi was gone.

Netflix played a different game in its early streaming days. It explored original productions alongside licensed content. It tested personalization algorithms. It expanded overseas while still running the DVD business. Multiplicity gave Netflix the raw material to adapt: shifting towards what worked and walking away from what didn’t.

There’s a lesson for the rest of us: don’t fall in love with one big idea.

Multiplicity as a Creative Act

Thomas Edison wasn’t the first to attempt the lightbulb. He was just the first to test more than 300 filaments before finding one that worked. Multiplicity didn’t slow him down. It made the breakthrough inevitable.

Designers have always prized multiplicity. Ask a graphic designer to create a new logo, and they’ll come up with several different options. Ask a product designer to reimagine a toaster, and they’ll invent fifty new ways to heat bread. 

And yet, smart business strategists often skip this stage. They seize on a single promising idea and spend months refining it — while other possibilities never get explored.

Creating Multiple Options

Multiplicity is particularly important when exploring a new opportunity space. The most inventive organizations build parallel tracks from the start, testing multiple approaches before committing. It’s a kind of insurance policy for innovation — not against failure, but against the wrong kind of failure, the kind that leaves you with nothing to show for the effort.

Venture capitalists routinely employ this tactic when exploring a new opportunity space. Right now, investors on Sand Hill Road have identified a big opportunity in quantum computing. And they’re investing in multiple competing businesses that each take a different approach, not just one.

So where do you start? Try these three areas of exploration…

Different Customers

Come up with new business ideas by serving different people. A food company might explore wellness by launching a mass-market brand. Or it might begin with a niche — say, athletes or pregnant mothers. Alternatively, it could create something for B2B customers, like corporate cafeterias. The point is to explore segments so far apart that each idea forces a new set of assumptions.

Different Revenue Models

Come up with new business ideas by considering different ways to make money. Too often, companies constrain themselves to the dominant model in their sector. Consumer packaged goods usually focus on unit sales, selling one package at a time. For years, media companies lived on advertising — until Netflix proved people would pay for subscriptions. Harry’s razors did the same in personal care. A new revenue model shapes the entire value chain differently, from product design to customer relationships.

Different Partnerships

Come up with new business ideas by trying on different partnerships. Not every concept needs to stand alone. How would the business change if it were a joint venture? If it licensed a well-known brand? If it shared revenue with a downstream channel partner? Partnerships can open capabilities, audiences, and channels you couldn’t access alone.

Putting Multiplicity into Practice

To be sure, many of us haven’t built this habit into our new business teams. But we can start with a few simple steps.

1. Generate broadly. Ask teams to generate a wide range of ideas. Push past the obvious and aim for variety across customers, models, and partnerships.
2. Select the most provocative. Choose the concepts that challenge your thinking or open entirely new avenues — the ones that feel risky in an interesting way.
3. Mock them up. Have teams create a lean, ten-page pitch deck for each idea, as if they were pitching it to investors. Cover the opportunity, the solution, the customer, and the business model. Try creating a simple P&L to capture initial thinking about revenue and costs.
4. Test in the real world. Take the most promising ideas and run small-scale pilots. Put them in front of customers, partners, and stakeholders, and let the results guide your investment.

Each of these levers pushes the imagination into new territory. And that’s the point. Multiplicity means you’re not betting on one horse — you’re building a whole stable of potential thoroughbreds, each trained for a different kind of race.

The Harder, Smarter Path

Multiplicity isn’t about hedging bets or indecision. It’s about building a portfolio of real contenders so you’re not left with nothing when the first one falters. It gives leaders resilience, not just optionality. It creates the conditions for adaptation in a volatile environment.

In a world where technology cycles are shorter, markets shift faster, and competitors emerge from anywhere, the one big idea is often the first casualty. Leaders who insist on multiple plays from the start are better positioned to adapt without losing momentum. And when a team comes to them, brimming with excitement about what they believe is the winning idea, the best response is a simple, clarifying question: “Compared to what?”