I don't think they need to learn how to program well enough to make the idea they had, but they should learn something about the process of software development. Even if that just means reading a couple books on managing softward development (almost anyone asking this question hasn't even spent 8 hours 1 day reading blogs like coding horror or joel on software).
Understanding some of the challenges in writing software, being able to succesfully communicate with their software developers, understanding that "build me twitter for pets" is not a spec etc.
I had someone come to me the other day and they thought they had a brilliant idea, if only I could put it together (but it would probably be easy). He described Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 to me. I told him it already existed. He was deflated.
Since he couldn't even understand what he was talking about, he wasn't really even able to do competitive analysis and didn't know these things existed.
Understanding some of the challenges in writing software, being able to succesfully communicate with their software developers, understanding that "build me twitter for pets" is not a spec etc.
I had someone come to me the other day and they thought they had a brilliant idea, if only I could put it together (but it would probably be easy). He described Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 to me. I told him it already existed. He was deflated.
Since he couldn't even understand what he was talking about, he wasn't really even able to do competitive analysis and didn't know these things existed.