As you may know from my other writing – I’m a big fan of not locking up ideas. The only way for new ideas to grow, expand and make an impact are to let them be tested in the marketplace. Letting the competition have access to them will help you evolve them to a market changing state that much faster.
However, the other side of that is to get all of the criticism out on the table to have your answers ready to. The traditional evolution of dealing with criticism to locked up ideas is to face it piecemeal as clients bring them up either during a sales meeting or, even worse, during delivery. You don’t have the opportunity to deal with pulling together full in complete responses during these sudden circumstances. By definition you are now putting yourself into unplanned explanations more often than you need to.
By exposing your idea to the marketplace you deal with these issues and concerns much more quickly. Additionally, you can claim to have a market tested theory and process. That’s sells better than any given proprietary idea.