Context: Rocket Internet is the name of the German company operated by the Samwer brothers, who have a reputation of cloning silicon valley's latest and greatest ideas for the German\EU market. Not technically doing anything illegal but certainly not held in the highest regard.

They clone successfully executed ideas, not any old idea someone has.

However they also consider their strength to be execution not innovation. That doesn't rule out ideas that seem like "obvious wins" but have yet to be tested.

Edit: Apparently in their mission statement they claim to only use proven ideas, but I still wouldn't do business with them regardless.

Why is it not held in high regard?

I agree, though I've never really agreed with the concept that idea and execution are separate things. I see an "idea" for a software application they way I see an idea for a novel. The execution and idea are very closely intertwined. Even intertwined is probably the wrong word, because that conjures up an image of two different things that are too tangled up to separate. I'd go even farther. The idea becomes the idea through the execution.

I suppose there is a sort of genesis of an idea, but even that probably already arrives with images of a UI and perhaps code in your head...

Even in Rocket Internet, the value is mostly in the execution, they have the resources and the expertise to copy any kind of project and they can create a whole team from scratch really quickly. And they are not going to spend anything on an unproven idea, before being copied by Rocket Internet you have definitely more important things to worry about.

> they are not going to spend anything on an unproven idea Exactly!

It's even in their mission statement: > Rocket identifies and builds proven Internet business models and transfers them to new, underserved or untapped markets where it seeks to scale them into market leading online companies.

Ideas are like assholes, everybody has one.