I'm still trying to figure out the answers to these questions. I get ideas about anything I pay enough attention to. Mostly this has happened in an academic context, so far. I had an idea that I intend to pursue in a startup-ish way, based on a way to modify to the bitcoin protocol to, roughly speaking, allow people to purchase time on the computational resources devoted to the blockchain lottery[1]. I got the idea when reading a thread on bitcointalk.org about a blockchain dedicated to cracking RSA keys. I went and had a shower shortly afterwards, and at some point during that suddenly it was clear to me how you could arrange such a blockchain in a secure way. It took a few months more thinking in my spare time to make the idea flexible enough to be useful, which sounds laborious, but was actually tremendous fun.
I'm still trying to figure out ways to assess the marketability of the idea. While asking people about the technical feasibility of the idea, I got some useful feedback on how it needs to be improved[2], but I'm still don't have a clear idea about how to reach potential customers[3]. My current plan is to survey people using GPUs for approximately embarassingly parallel Monte Carlo inference and optimization, because the computational constraints in my framework bear some resemblance to those of GPU programs, and I think GPU developers could migrate fairly easily.
I'm still trying to figure out ways to assess the marketability of the idea. While asking people about the technical feasibility of the idea, I got some useful feedback on how it needs to be improved[2], but I'm still don't have a clear idea about how to reach potential customers[3]. My current plan is to survey people using GPUs for approximately embarassingly parallel Monte Carlo inference and optimization, because the computational constraints in my framework bear some resemblance to those of GPU programs, and I think GPU developers could migrate fairly easily.
[1] https://docs.googlye.com/open?id=0B3qaT-ZL6aeKMWFhNmIwOGYtNW...
[2] E.g., https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64421.msg757930#msg7...
[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609991