If only I’d thought of a blanket with arms.  I’d be a millionaire by now, right?  No, not really.  I actually did think of a blanket with arms, long before Snuggie was a worldwide brand.  And I’d seen plenty of other armed-blankets for sale, in catalogs you find in airplane seat pockets, selling their cashmere novelties for $119.  Needless to say, when a cheaper version came out, I bought one, unknowing that anyone else would care about a product I’d been saying I’d buy “one of these days” for a few years running.

So why am I not a millionaire?  And why aren’t those cashmere innovators millionaires either?  Because we didn’t orient our business models around cheap materials, hokey TV commercials and direct mail-order distribution.  It’s the businessman that’s able to execute an idea that reaps the rewards of that “aha” moment.  Not the folks that sit around saying “why didn’t I think of that?”

For the rest of you that have an idea for the next best thing, there’s a new website called AHHHA.  It’s a social ideation site that wants to convert light-bulb moments to “cha-ching” moments.  Based on the concepts of shared entrepreneur resources, such as Y-Combinator, AHHHA combines newly established standards around social networking, social media and gamification in order to create a leveragable network of ideas and business-planning.

“Ideas are cheap.  Execution is rare,” AHHHA founder and CEO Matt Crowe states from a place of experience.  “Our platform is based on ideas.  What’s powerful about what we created is it’s not only a crowdsourced idea tool, but an automation service to assist the process of execution.”

And how does that work?  Through two user mechanisms; submitting an idea, and participating in one.  You choose where you want to fit into this process, and take advantage of a shared, online workspace to maintain and follow-through with a particular idea.  The feature list is pretty abbreviated as it stands now–AHHA launched only today.  There’s a long roadmap of features that will roll-out in the coming weeks, touching on patent filing, a product marketplace and virtual credits, which are instantly redeemable.  Where AHHHA hopes to stand out, however, is in the end results.  Crowe wants users to turn big profits off their ideas, driving action and revenue around them.

AHHHA will be tapping into social data to provide services and features, coming from a place of pragmatism that incorporates end users and corporations alike.  Working towards a more effecient market will rely heavily on data analysis, and in this case, AHHHA recognizes the power in social sharing and the right tool set.

This idea farm is rather ideal in its own right, particularly as many business processes have yet to be automated, even with the help of virtualized services.  That being said, AHHHA comes from a place of efficiency, looking to enable users around the tasks that are usually difficult to overcome from an entrepreneurial standpoint.  Crowe’s hoping to take the growing trends around crowd-sourced and peer-to-peer communities, helping along a socio-economic movement that pushes innovation beyond the idea phase, the confines of a corporate environment and our own insecurities.

There’s no telling how successful AHHHA’s network will be–that’s up to its user base and AHHHA’s ability to take advantage of web tools for the purpose of overcoming traditional barriers.  We all know it’s the follow-through that matters, and Crowe’s team will have to find its own balance point between real-world scenarios, its founding principles and its own ability to deliver products to market.  But empowering a new generation of idea-makers is certainly a worthy cause.

AHHHA expects 10-20% of ideas to turn into something feasable, with aims to turn its own platform into an online replica of what takes place for businesses in real life.  The beauty of the web in this case is that it extends your resource base, as well as your audience, providing more opportunities for things to get done.  Beyond this, AHHHA sets out to revolutionize the way businesses, even the IP process, operates.  Crowe hopes his platform will better reflect the way businesses operate today, stating that even market share is more valuable than a patent (what would Apple say to that?).

“It’s human nature to want to do the easy things first, saving the hard things for later,” Crowe continues.  “AHHHA systemizes things with a handful of steps users can follow.  The end-game is to monetize ideas for the user.”