There are a lot of creating people out there, but combining business smarts with a creative idea is a challenge, writes Caroline Madden

YOU'RE STARING out the window daydreaming during class, or at work, and suddenly the most amazing business idea pops into your head. Eureka!

You can't believe nobody has thought of it before and soon you're daydreaming about gracing the cover of Fortune magazine and being hailed as the most creative entrepreneur of your generation.

Coming up with a promising business concept is exhilarating and, yes, you may indeed have the potential to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook while studying at Harvard, but, unless you're able to translate that good idea into a profitable one, then you can wave goodbye to a glittering entrepreneurial future.

Cashing in on creativity isn't as easy as it looks. Creative types - artists, film makers, animators, web designers - thrive on the excitement of generating new ideas but sometimes struggle with the more mundane, commercial side of running a business.

"Often the danger is that the person who comes up with lots of creative ideas doesn't necessarily want to think about the business side of things," says Caroline O'Sullivan, head of the creative media programmes run at Dundalk Institute of Technology.

"They don't necessarily want to think about having a business plan, or things like finance or project management.

"Their desire to create something of critical merit in artistic terms can become greater than the need to make money," says Dr Thomas Cooney, lecturer in entrepreneurship at Dublin Institute of Technology. "Ultimately you cannot survive unless you're making sales."

How can you build a profitable business without stifling your creative flair? One strategy is to create an entrepreneurial team by setting up a business with two or three other people, whose strengths lie in other areas.

"Research has clearly demonstrated that there is a positive link between high growth firms and entrepreneurial teams," Dr Cooney says. "Bringing that balance of creativity and business acumen together creates a very, very strong partnership in which one can succeed."

Aspiring entrepreneurs should also work to their strengths.

"Let the creative person focus on what they're strong at, which is the creativity," he suggests. "Let the business person focus on what they're good at."

John Rice, who is featured in this week's video clip, worked as an animator with MTV before setting up the cartoon company Jam Media with two friends and taking up the reins as chief executive.

"It was a bit of a baptism of fire starting off," he admits. "I knew nothing about business plans or balance sheets or finance or projections."

So how did he cope? "It's all about getting the right team together and surrounding yourself with the right people and realising that you can't do everything yourself," he explains.

Dr Stephen Brennan, director of marketing and strategy at the Digital Hub (which houses a cluster of more than 100 creative and digital technology companies), agrees that the challenge for creative people is not coming up with ideas, but getting those ideas funded and getting them into the marketplace.

"What we have found in the Digital Hub over the last 4½ years of operation is that there are quite a lot of creative people with creative ideas. That is enough to get the company formed, and even in many cases [get] your first or your second customer," Dr Brennan notes. "The challenge then is to develop a profitable and long-term business from that original idea."

Once you've mastered the art of combining business smarts with a creative idea, it's time to start all over again.

One good idea is rarely enough to sustain a business in the long term. You must build on your initial success and continue to develop products or indeed launch new offerings into the marketplace.

Jam Media's first animation series Picme, which was aimed at the pre-school market, was a surprise hit but did they rest on their laurels? Definitely not. They kept the creative juices flowing and came up with Funky Fables, an animation series which uses the same technology but which is targeted at older children.

As Rice puts it: "It's like a wave and surfing - once it starts to go you have to stay up on it."