In this webinar Jonny Fisher, CRO & Co-founder at Idea Drop, talks about the importance of having a robust idea evaluation process that allows you to evaluate ideas at scale. He also demonstrates our idea evaluation matrix that helps organise and rank ideas against the metrics that matter for your organisation.
What is the purpose of an idea evaluation process?
Gathering ideas is, of course, just the start of the process. Focusing your time and energy on taking forward ideas that have the maximum impact is a must, so how you evaluate ideas is key. If you collect a lot of ideas, and do not do anything with them – there is no value for those ideas. It’s essential to have a decision-making system in place to make selecting the right ideas as efficient and effective as possible.
Evaluating ideas involves assessing many factors (not all in this list) such as:
How much will the idea cost to implement and run?
What impact will it have on your business and the bottom line?
How long will it take to implement?
Does it align with your strategic goals? (is it right for the business)
Idea Evaluation Matrix step by step guide
An idea evaluation matrix is that it enables you to rank each idea based on the score it receives for various factors or criteria. We’ve put in a few criteria here such as time, cost, potential impact and monetary impact. These can be changed, added to and simplified not all ideas should follow this same matrix. We don’t want to be looking at every single idea, it will be too time consuming so how do we use technology to help refine this.
Step 1 – Select the ideas to put through your matrix
First, you need to select the ideas that you want to take forward and place them into the idea evaluation matrix in order to go against the criteria coefficient and factors being assessed by.
Step 2 – Choose your ranking criteria
Time – How much time will each idea take to plan, implement and produce results?
Cost – What will it cost to bring this idea to life. An idea which has a high cost does not mean it is bad idea, it may have more potential impact in order to be considered
Potential impact – Is this a major shift in the way that you work? Will it change the way your clients see you? Big, bold ideas can be scary, but often highlight the changes that need to happen.
Monetary impact – Is this idea going to directly impact your bottom line? Innovation should have a direct impact on your company finances, so always consider this dimension carefully.
Step 3 – Rate your criteria
You’ll need to establish a rating scale – a “criteria coefficient” for each of the criteria you’ve chosen for your matrix. The scale will go from 1 (low importance) to 5 (high importance)
Step 4 – Score each idea
Once you’ve rated your criteria, you can move on to scoring each idea based on the criteria you’ve chosen. Score from 1 to 5 (1 being the least effective, 5 being the most) how well each idea meets each of your chosen criteria
Step 5 – Calculate each idea’s weighted score
To calculate the weighted score for each idea, first you need to find the weighted score for each idea in each of your chosen criteria. To do that, simply multiply the ranking you’ve given to each criterion with the score you’ve awarded for each idea in that particular criterion.
Step 6 – Sum the weighted scores and compare
The final step is to sum the weighted scores across each criterion for every idea in your matrix, and to write these scores in the final column of the matrix. You can then compare these scores to evaluate which ideas are the most viable (those with the highest scores) and which are the least.
An idea evaluation matrix can prove an invaluable decision-making tool for helping you to find the best, most-workable ideas.
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