A Profitable Business Doesn’t Have to Be Based on A Brilliant Technical Idea
baglady.dreamhosters.comNo shit Sherlock!
Look around you. Everything you see around you, literally everything other than the human beings and maybe the plants if you're in the countryside, everything around you is there because a business put it there.
99.999% of them don't have any technical ideas at all.
The advantage of a brilliant technical idea is that it scales better. Hiring more people to make more money sucks. The holy grail most people who start technology startups are following is an idea which scales so well that it can be built up to be worth millions or billions even though only a handful of people really built it. You couldn't do that with a construction firm, by contrast.
I think a good metric of a successful business is earnings/employee. It shows how well you can leverage your infrastructure, and how well you can replicate existing success.
Examples: GOOG, Berkshire Hathaway