You’ve taken the first steps towards becoming known as an innovative business. You have gathered many creative ideas from customers and from employees. However, now you need to do some weeding and find a way work out which creative solutions will lead your business into the future.
What you need are simple evaluation tools to help you decide which ideas to discard and which to follow up on. You need ideas that have synergy with your business in its aims, values and direction.
Evaluation tools to best fit your business
There are a number of ready made idea evaluation tools available on the market. You may need to consider adapting these to match the specific needs of your business. This is because your business will most likely have different criteria against which you want to evaluate all your ideas.
You may also want to consider creating a simple idea evaluation tool that can be adapted to suit ideas gathered to solve particular problems.
So what should an idea evaluation tool do? Most importantly it should give you the criteria to judge all ideas against. This will help you to decide the ideas to follow up on and which ones to discard, at least in the short term.
Innovative Companies Discard Dud Ideas Early
Because your business may have limited resources, or even if you don’t, there’s no real benefit in spending too much time and money in following up or exploring ideas unsuitable to your business needs. You can’t afford to ‘trial’ every single idea that arrives on your desk!
Ideally your idea evaluation tool should have several steps in the process, which will allows you to discard some ideas straight away, take only a few ideas on to a ‘trial’ phase and then decide on the best idea to implement completely. This means you won’t be wasting time and resources in trialling every single idea.
Innovative businesses will work to evaluate and decide on which idea keep or discard reasonably early on in the process. This is important, because unless you discard some ideas, you’ll stretch your limited resources too thin and then won’t be able to properly resource the implementation of the best idea.
Questions Idea Evaluation Tools Should Answer
The following questions can help you decide which evaluation tool to use and what your evaluation tool should achieve. Ask yourself:
- What is the ‘problem’ we want to solve. All great innovations come from creative ideas to solve particular problems. Liquid paper was invented by a secretary who wanted to solve the problem of making typing errors, for example. Your idea evaluation tool should always start with the ‘problem’ and give each idea a rating on how well they solve the problem.
- What are the benefits of this idea? The benefits of each idea may be different, but a good evaluation tool will enable benefits to be listed and even given a rating on how much of a benefit it will bring to the company. * What are the disadvantages of this idea? Some ideas will have obvious disadvantages that will enable you to decide to discard them quickly. Other ideas may seem great until you trial them and discover the disadvantages
- What resources will be needed before we can fully implement this idea? This question helps businesses decide what ideas are cost-effective to implement and may prevent the business from spending too much on an idea that is too expensive to start up. If the idea needs a complete change to all the manufacturing equipment you currently have, it may not be worthwhile following up. If however, you can implement the idea with only a few minor modifications to existing equipment, it may well be worth trialling.
- Does this idea ‘fit’ our business? The idea has to fit within the image, values and mission of the business. Otherwise, it may take the business in a whole new direction. Sometimes ideas are so good, businesses are willing to move into that new direction. However, most ideas that do not ‘fit’ the company will be more costly to implement because new equipment, procedures and people may have to be involved in the implementation of the idea.
Good idea evaluation tools will enable your business to make the step from idea to implementation without spending too much time and resources on the ‘bad’ ideas. Find the best creative solutions to your business problem with great idea evaluation tools and good idea management.
