Well put Erik,

Indeed, there are times when the market needs a "me-too" product. And in such cases one can get to market successfully, especially if you have sufficient generic Know-how to efficiently develop the specific Know-how.

Unfortunately, it is more often the case that if a product is (relatively) easilly Me-too'ed, it is quickly commoditized such that you need economy of scale to make the margins work. My favorite example is the various memory modules (DIMM, SIMM, et al). There's plenty of demand for any number of Me-too's, but unless you can crank out about a buh-jillion per month, you aren't going to make enough profit to pay you electric bill.

So the trick is to discern which category your idea falls into before you sink a lot of resources into the project.

Joe