10 Ways to Select Ideas

By Tim Kastelle on 2 August 2013 in experiments, innovation strategy, selection

One Big Innovation Stumbling Block
Innovation is the process of idea management:

Of course, you need ideas.

But once you have them, you have to select which ones are most
promising because we never have enough time and resources to execute
them all.
And we do have to execute thats a critical step.
Because innovation takes longer than we expect it to, we have to keep the
people within our organisation engaged with the process as it is happening
(often an issue in big firms).
And in addition to all of that, we have to get the idea to spread.

Most organisations have plenty of ideas - their innovation failures happen in

other stages of the process. There are tools available to measure how well you do
in each of these steps.
This is what the results look like for many firms:

The scores are the average for each group, and low scores are better. If there is a
score of 5 in a category, then the firm is as good as they could possibly be, but if
the score is 15, then they have major problems.

This firm has their biggest problems in selecting which ideas to pursue and this
is a very common, very big innovation stumbling block. This is important
because if you are choosing the wrong ideas to execute, it doesnt really matter
how many great ideas you have, or how good you are at executing them.
Poor selection can ruin the whole process.
10 Ways to Select Ideas
If this is a problem in your organisation, here are 10 ways that you can select
ideas.
1. Most interesting to you: this is the way that many scientists choose
problems to work on, and its pretty common in startups as well. The
advantage to this approach is that by choosing the most interesting idea,
you keep your engagement level high. The drawback is that the most
interesting idea isnt necessarily the one that creates the most value for
people, so this approach can lead to major idea diffusion problems.
2. Guess: this is surprisingly common (just like it is in choosing prices).
There aren many clear advantages to this I guess the main one is that
this is the easiest process to follow. So it can work well when market
uncertainty is really high, or if you have an incredibly deep understanding
of customer needs. The drawback is that in every other situation,
processes with a bit more analysis work much better. Another version of
guessing is going with whatever idea the CEO likes best.
3. Most valuable to customers: you can get information on this in a few
ways: customer validation, focus groups, crowdsourcing, customer cocreation. The big advantage to choosing ideas based on customer input is
that it gives you a pretty good idea about what your potential market is
so getting your new idea to spread is easier. The drawback is people often
dont know what they want, so this approach only gives you incremental
innovation.
4. Innovation portfolio: if you use an innovation portfolio, you try to ensure
that you have in development a good mix of incremental ideas, extensions
into adjacent markets, and radical innovations. Google and many
others aim for a 70/20/10 ration across these three categories. The
disadvantages to this approach is that it can be a bit bureaucratic, which
can slow down innovation, and it only works when your organisation has a
lot of ideas to work on its no good for startups. For nearly every other
organisation, though, this is a terrific way to select ideas.
5. Formal process: formal selection processes can take different forms. This
category includes things like stage-gate, using idea management software,

sending all ideas to an Innovation Coach, and so on. The advantages and
disadvantages to these approaches are very similar to those for innovation
portfolios. The trap to avoid here is starting with tool instead start with
your strategies, objectives and culture, and then find a tool that works in
your context.
6. Solve the most urgent problem: like guessing, this approach is both
common and deeply flawed. It works ok in a crisis. At other times, this
approach will lead to strategic drift which can be disastrous.
7. Experts: you can use experts to help you rate the ideas that you are
choosing from. These can be internal experts with either deep technical
knowledge or great innovation experience. Or it can be external experts or
stakeholders. This process can work well for bigger, riskier ideas. But its
much too slow for small ideas.
8. Voting: again, this can be done internally or externally. You can
crowdsource your feedback like threadless, or use innovation jams using
your own people plus important stakeholders, or have people vote within
a piece of innovation management software. The advantages and
disadvantages to this approach are the same as choosing whats most
valuable to your customer.
9. Experiments: this is my favourite. One good way to choose ideas is to
prototype or try as many as possible on a small scale. Then do more of the
ones that work, and make sure that you learn from the ones that dont. The
advantage here is that this is a very data-driven approach, it works well
when you face uncertainty, and even little bets can lead to radical
innovations. The advantage is that you have data on what works and what
doesnt, which is the best way to choose ideas that merit further
development. The disadvantage is that you burn resources (time, money)
on the prototypes that dont work.
10. Combination: many organisations use a combination of these tools.
Google uses choose the most interesting to you with its 20% time rule
engineers can work on whatever projects appeal to them. But then they
use an Innovation Portfolio approach to make decisions about which ideas
to scale up.
How to Choose One
Actually, you can use one of these tools to choose the best tool. You could be
experimental make a hypothesis about which approach will work best for you,
then test it. Or you can ask a panel of experts. Or guess.
The main point is to evaluate which method youre using right now. If you have
an idea selection problem, then figure out a new one to try out, and try it. Track

data on your success rates, so that you learn. If things dont get better, try
another tool.
Which method does your organisation use?