We live in the age of ideas. It's ideas that make jeans worth $300 and water no longer available for free. The idea to brand relationships are fairly obvious. If not to all of us, at least to savvy marketers who use them to their advantage everyday.

Obviously, some ideas have a longer shelf life than others. The question is, do you know when yours is expiring?

-Grameen Bank had a brilliant idea of empowering bangladeshi women out of poverty as mobile rental providers at a time when mobile phones were expensive. Now mobiles are more available and affordable than ever in Bangladesh. Is it still wise to reinvest in the program or is it time to retire the idea or keep feeding the path to obsolescence?

-The idea of "walled content" saved universities like Harvard Business School from declining enrollments. More professionals and entrepreneurs (myself included) contribute to their bottom line than all of their students combined. But in the emerging age of Free Content, will the "premium content" model still hold up?

-Ever since Google was up for IPO, everyone and their cousin tried their hand in the search game. From A9 to Chacha, cool technologies sit by the curb like the homeless begging for visitors to elevate them to "The Next Google". Do you really think that's going to happen, or did the destination site boat already sail?

-Wired recently had a post about the lamest social networks. Do I need to elaborate further about starting your own? Is it really about yet another community, or offering value wherever people may be connecting to each other?

-Even investing in The Internet as is might prove dangerous with increasing security threats as we migrate offline infrastructure systems online. Not to mention the inherent inefficiencies of distributing bandwidth hogging content like HD video that Bittorrent and others are trying to address.

See, in the current flux, the rate of change is faster than ever before. The moving parts intersecting cultural vibe, technical possibilities and the current geopolitical influence is exactly that: MOVING!

If you don't understand what moves and when, your brilliant idea might easily become the black hole of organizational and personal energy suck because the premise under which your idea originally bloomed no longer exists!