Selecting concepts to test
Meat & Livestock Australia September 1, 2021
To have a productive and creative brainstorm, you need a good idea filtering process so that people are confident that ideas will be properly processed. Filtering ideas means reflecting on every idea, theming, creating clusters and then prioritising them against your criteria.
Theming
- review all the ideas
- select one idea
- ask the group to identify other ideas which are linked to the first idea and place the like ideas together.
When you have clustered all the ideas, give each cluster a label, for example:
- technology
- skill development and training
- communication
- marketing and so on.
Then create a concept statement that relates to the cluster of ideas and the label. For example:
Technology: create a new app that integrates all farm data
Filtering
Use the matrix below to sort through the concepts. Select your differentiators, for example, impact versus cost as in the example below. You could decide other horizontal and vertical differentiators for your situation, for example, time versus value.
Review each concept and place in the quadrant that suits. The green quadrant is for concepts that best meet your criteria and should take priority. Orange is for those that are possibilities, and red represents ideas that meet neither of the differentiators.
When you have selected two or three concepts which could solve your problem in an innovative way, you can progress to prototyping and testing each to see which is the most effective.
How to apply the innovation conversation sheet.
The questions on the sheet are generic for all organisations but cover the main considerations for thinking through an innovation. You should review the questions to suit your organisation. You might add new ones, change, or delete those provided.
Then:
• use the see, think, do stages and questions as a guide for projects
• use it in team meetings to frame discussions about new ideas
• ask team members to use it to help prepare pitches for ideas
• find tools that help you to answer the questions in each of the stages