[danenania]

In my experience, the most important knowledge the idea guy lacks isn't how to code, it's how to plan and structure the project so that it can actually get done given whatever constraints. In order to get this, some level of technical understanding and grokking of programming is required, and this is the main asset that learning basic programming can bring to an idea guy, even if he never gets anywhere near good enough to write production code. Idea guys without that grounding tend to be overly ambitious and extremely susceptible to scope creep, not to mention more difficult for programmers to work with. These types of problems can easily be fatal to a project.

I should add that most developers don't seem to have much of this knowledge either. It comes from a rare blend of anticipating customer needs, technical understanding, and general pragmatism. The more projects I work on, the more I come to believe that someone who fills this gap is worth ten times more than both the dude with the 'great idea' and the all star coder.