If competitive advantage is the Holy Grail of business strategy, big ideas are the Holy Grail of brand development.
On one side of the chasm is your business. On the other, the people you would like to do business with.
Your business has a challenge which needs solving. The better the challenge is understood, the better the solution will be. This is the great discipline that engineering teaches us.
And the better the people on the far side of the chasm feel understood and appreciated, the more they will value what your business has to offer. This is the great truth of strategy.
The bridge which spans the chasm and links your business with those people is a big idea. A big idea links two things which have not been linked before. Whisky and persistence, for example.
A big idea solves your business problem because it addresses some issue which runs deep for your customers. In our experience, it is this marriage of the intrinsic and the extrinsic that is key to an idea becoming the source of unfair competitive advantage.