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Develop Effective Evaluation
Criteria
This simple and effective technique can be used
by individuals or by groups of decision makers for fast evaluation of
innovative ideas.
First and foremost, you must develop effective
idea evaluation criteria.
brainstorming
a broad list of criteria by which you wish to evaluate innovative ideas or
any proposed new course of action for your business. Your corporate
vision,
competitive strategies
and
guiding principles will help you
streamline this brainstorming session. Having generated a lot of criteria,
select 20 most important ones. Then narrow this list down to 5 or 10 by
combining sister criteria or deleting weaker ones.
Define the Evaluation
Process
Having finalized the list of criteria, weight
them according to their importance to your business.
To evaluate an idea, rate how well it meets
each criterion. The highest rating of 10 would indicate the idea perfectly
meets that criterion. A rating of 0 would indicate the idea does not meet
that criterion in any way whatsoever.
The following formula is used to calculate the
total idea rating:
Sum of weighted ratings /
Highest possible total score × 100%
Generally, scores of 80% or higher indicate the
idea is very valuable and worth taking further.
Make Your
Idea Management Process Leaner
Now, you have an easy-to-use and very effective
strategic tool for idea evaluation.
Communicate
it to your people. Everybody in your organization should know what criteria
are used for
evaluation of innovative ideas.
Creative thinkers
should also be able to evaluate their ideas themselves before submitting
them to decision makers. This will make the idea generation process more
focused and increase the quality of ideas submitted to decision makers for
evaluation. The whole
idea management
process will become much leaner.
It will be easier to get gold out of the sand
as there will be less sand and more gold in it.
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