You might think procrastination of your idea till you get to the point where you've accumulated enough skills to pull it off might be good here. I have some objections:

• Life is short, life is unpredictable, there is not much value at holding things back for revenue. After all you can't take a dime with you to whatever unknown is waiting for us.
• Think of all the opportunities and people you miss along the way while you are busy sharpening your skills.
• It is not efficient. If you have the idea, and someone else has the skills, there is no need to create an artificial bottleneck for impending profit.
• In this universe, 'information' yearns to be free.
• If you are capable of generating good ideas, probably you will find some more along the way, get this one out, meanwhile you can always sharpen your skills for the 'next' idea.

I'd say try to form a community around yourself with you leading people into brainstorming on the original idea you have and get it out there!

PS: Not An Investment Advice :)

In general I would share, though you can share with as small a group of people you trust as you want to get feedback, increasing in publicity as you're comfortable.

About people stealing your ideas — here's something that my mom told me when I was young and drawing a lot of cartoons, basically it goes like this: If you're a truly creative person, you never need to worry about somebody stealing your ideas. The only people who steal ideas are people who cant come up with them on their own. Those people latch onto ideas and never let go because it's all they have, when the creative person can come up with another new idea, and another, and another…

And you'll see people with ideas. Some have an overflowing basket full of ideas, other holding ideas people have a death-grip on just one idea because that's all they have.

So far in my schooling and career I've seen people that fit into both categories, so another 'layer' of protection is showing your ideas to people you know are creative. They don't need to steal your idea, and if you show them one of yours they might respond by showing you 1 or more of their ideas, or maybe showing your idea starts a brainstorm and you both think of new ideas. The people you would have to watch out for stealing your ideas are non-creative people who don't have an idea :D

It's your idea, so other people probably won't be as excited about it as you, else someone else would have had that idea before you. Hence, the probability that others will steal the idea is not that big.

It's rather the opposite: You will have to convince or pay someone else to actually help you implement it, if you are lacking the skills!

I know at least from my company (Bosch), that we share our private ideas in our internal company network and see if someone else is interested in helping create a company-internal startup in order to make a product out of it. So far, no ideas were stolen or leaked and most stuff just lies around, because aint nobody got time to convince others. And hell, there are some good ideas!

My father was in finances all his life, running a bank when I was about 18. It was in late 80s. Often I talked about my "ideas" and bottom line of his reply was "son, ides are worth 1c". I wasn't expecting that, couldn't completely agree with that, thought maybe someones elses ideas are worth 1c but not mine. It took me MBA degree and years as CEO of IT outsourcing company to fully understand it. It is delivery that counts! Your knowledge, passion, time and dedication you're willing to invest to make the idea work. Today, when I'm in situation to invest in some "ideas", I'm sure I'd never invest in idea only. Investors put their money and time in the team, not the idea itself. Only after they detect that passion and dedication they will consider the idea.

This changed the way I think some time ago. I was now focused on people, dedication, PRODUCTs and not only ideas. But being in IT as long as in management and economics, I have to continue to another "truth" that I learned even later. We were proud that we skipped "talking about ideas " stage of our careers and were doing real products and services. Being in IT we focused so much on technology aspects, quality, features, design, etc. Often we were "angry" how bad products/companies do better than us. Then, another simple sentence hit me, I think it's part of american business philosophy but I don't remember who said it. It was something like "anybody can have a product". It shocked me a bit at first. We just "reached another level", put praise on ideas behind us and started working on the real thing and now somebody says that just anybody can do that! That it's nothing important! What is then? Well, bottom line of this, as I see it now, was just emphasizing how sales, marketing and money/investment is equally (or even more) important to success of the product than it's technology/design.

So why do I mention this in addition to "ideas are worth 1c"? Because most of us here (like my company back then) are programmers or in some other part of IT and we all tend to (over)emphasize our part of work. But you have to realize there is so much more to successful product that is not directly related to IT.

Back to "idea"... this should give you some picture what a long way lays between an idea and a successful product. It should also show you my opinion about sharing ideas. Just do it. You'll see benefits of it along the way. And there are so many more poorly executed ideas out there than hidden ones. So, you'll never run out of the ones you can deliver if you have what's needed to do it.

From what I've come to understand as I've gotten older is that ideas are not unique and someone else probably has the same ideas as you due to the general zeitgeist.

Either people are too busy or currently working on the same idea already, so withholding the idea won't accomplish much.

On the flip side, telling people your idea could get people on board with it, tell you whether there's a market for the idea, or at the very least if someone gets that idea off the ground and massively successful before you're able to, then you can't point to your buddies and say "See! I told you that was a great idea!" and then have people more apt to listen to you, assist you, or invest in you in the future.