Filter and Evaluate Ideas
Once your "Idea-Box" is full, you will need a clear plan of what to do with the suggestions collected. Remember: You raise expectations when collecting ideas by all people you invite to "fill the box". We introduced to you several tecniques and tools, which might produce a lot of ideas. Now comes one important step, which is much more difficult than idea creation/collection: You have to decide which ideas are the "right" ones for your company. Therefore you need to define clear rules.... .
In this section we suggest different ways of how to filter ideas first and how to evaluate the remaining ones. For both steps there is a huge variety of tools and it is hard to structure them. Therefore we concentrate on simple methods how to first filter and then evaluate an idea or suggestion. One recommendation before you start choosing your method: It is important to ban (filter) inappropriate ideas as soon as possible from your collection. When doing so you should be aware that you need clear and transparent rules (evaluate). Without such rules, you risk of demotivating the suggestion givers and next time you will open the idea-box it might be empty.
In this article we introduce some simple questions innovation experts use for Idea screening (or filtering). All managers responsible for defining the rules for filtering and evaluating of ideas should be aware of the fact that innovation is always linked to change: “If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.” [Albert Einstein].
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.