Are ideas or execution the limiting step of progress

My good and smart friend Dr. Alex Holub wrote to me that ideas are cheap.

I replied that I disagreed, and that in my experience, good ideas ripe for their time in the hands of capable executors are the limiting step of progress.

He responded: "Yeah but that's unusual ... and only b/c you are very smart ;) ..."

I continue to disagree: I can always hire hands for execution, I can always raise capital, but good ideas cannot always be bought. For most any given problem, there are thousands of people who could execute them, hundreds or thousands of people who could fund them, but only a handful (sometimes one) of people who have a good idea of how to solve it. I have long thought that ideas were the bottleneck of progress. No man is indispensable...other people will think the same ideas in the same context sooner or later, so progress is more or less an inevitable succession of contexts brought about by one another, but I think its speed is dictated largely by the availability of good ideas in the hands of entrepreneurial people with the drive to make them true. It's a question I have a great deal of interest in, so if you have any evidence against my hypothesis, I'd like to hear about it.

Quotes on ideas

• According to Seth Godin (bestselling author and entrepreneur), “this century is about ideas…we recognize that ideas are driving the economy, ideas are making people rich and most important, ideas are changing the world” --Unleashing the Ideavirus.
• "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come" --Victor Hugo
• "Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination" --John Dewey
• "Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress" --Theodore Levitt
• "No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess" --Isaac Newton.