[ideonexus]

My wife is a 3D print-designer, who takes her prints to craft shows. We've quickly learned that the best way to increase sales is to have a large variety of designs rather than a smaller selection of high-quality designs. She can make $30 selling one high-quality replica of a historic landmark that took her weeks of painstaking modeling time, but she has to find the one person who wants that print. Alternatively, she can mass-produce refrigerator magnets of birds, flowers, and animals that take just a few hours of modeling time and output them in such a variety that she can easily sell dozens in a day at $5 each.

It's what makes Amazon so profitable and AliBaba such a threat. It's the "longtail" business model, but for ideas. Like Linus Pauling said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."