I have a professor (post) who loves ideas. That's all he does, he thinks. And he thinks big. He thinks about ways to restructure society's perception of how the world works. His logic: if we perceive that the world can work differently, then it will work differently. So he architects ideas like one would a building. He imagines cities, ecosystems, governments, roads, and most of all the future. 

For him ideas should not be informed by the past. It doesn't make sense, he says. How can we as innovators look to the past when the past had different needs. The way to think, he promotes, is by looking to the future. By predicting what the needs will be a month from now a year from now and even 10,000 years from now. 

The greatest idea as he sees it is one which will last forever. One which is as close to permanent (post) as possible. Sustainable. 

And I see where he is coming from and I can get behind it. But I'm not so sure that's the only thing to a universally great idea, that it holds up not to the past and not to the present necessarily, but to the future.

I think it's an important question we should ask ourselves. It informs the way we go about thinking. What exactly makes an idea good? I think there must be a couple levels on which to answer this question. I think everyone must have a capacity for a personal response to an idea. Like one of those light bulb moments. "Oh, that just makes sense to me personally."

But I also think there must exist a degree of universality. The wheel for example. The perfect idea. There must then exist some ideas which everyone the world over can say are good. What types of ideas are these? 

So on a forum like this one I think it is a question of the utmost importance. If this is a website where we come and discuss things intelligently, where we discuss big ideas, what exactly makes up an idea and what makes it a good one?