Thinking big outside the box

At the end of a History Channel program about the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, they made a very interesting point. When the Eiffel Tower was built, it was a shocking design, completely out of keeping with French design at the time. Now of course the Tower is the very icon of all things French. The commentator noted that, had the tower been built in London (or in Barcelona, as originally intended) then we would see the Tower as a truly British piece of architecture today.

Sometimes the things we see as dramatically different and unthinkable will appear, after a time, to be common and unthinkable only in the sense of it not being there. Many ideas we have are borne out of the past. Sometimes they need to be borne out of the future.

Are you sitting on a Big Idea just because it's out-of-keeping with common standards? If you follow through with it, it could become the common standard.

[side note - read the wikipedia article on the Petronas Towers (or watch the History Channel show on it) to see the value the builders gained from having competing teams working on each of the two towers. A project of this size can almost be assured of coming in behind schedule, but competition led to an on-time completion]