Texperts, Multimaps, and Glasses Direct all have one thing in common: they all started in their founders’ bedrooms.

Search engine giant Google was built by two boys in a rented garage, not by a technology titan employing thousands of researchers and engineers but just by two brilliant boys with a jolly good idea.

“Low budget research ideas are challenging big corporations,” Craig Barrett, chairman at technology behemoth Intel declared during a recent presentation at the Saïd Business School, Oxford. “The three major challenges for Microsoft have not come from large corporations but from a single idea with one or two researchers,” he continued.

There is much to be said for good ideas. One of the features in this month’s Growing Business magazine looks at Jerome Touze co-founder of Wayn.com, a social networking site for travellers and holidaymakers. When he originally conceived of the idea, Touze was worried about the fact that he had little business acumen and was far from a technology whiz kid.

Has this held him back? Far from it – as Jon Card points out in his article Wayn.com now was 13.5 million users and is still growing.

Another high profile, yet little known until today (thanks to the Metro newspaper) is that it was Richard Branson who initially came up with the idea for the Now that’s what I call music compilation CD series.

The series, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, was launched in 1983 following a conversation with Virgin boss Richard Branson and one-time rival EMI about collaborating on a compilation project. The series was an instant hit and to date 70 albums have been released.

Which goes to show, you don’t need to be an expert in your chosen field to be massively successful and make mega bucks: but being Richard Branson helps.