Addressing business challenges and goals starts with insightful ideas. But even when an organization has lots of ideas, these are sometimes based upon prior assumptions/conditions that may now be invalid. So, it’s valuable to have a process for generating/assessing ideas that meet the criteria of being: relevant, current, promising, and actionable, along with a way to cull the list and prioritize ideas for action.
Here’s the process in a nutshell:
Establish Objectives
- Define the business goals to be accomplished by the ideas.
- Get clear about the market/segment/persona(s) to be addressed, and what problems/goals apply.
Generation
- Unrestricted idea generation using techniques such as the Four Actions Framework, Provocation, etc. to create a catalog of ideas/concepts. (Get in touch if you need help.)
- Review and decompose any pre-existing ideas that may be added to the catalog.
Clarifying
- Refine ideas enough to clarify key elements for common understanding. Determine what assumptions/hypotheses underpin the ideas.
- Identify any existing solutions that are similar while noting the differences.
Grouping
- Group ideas/concepts by category (e.g.: problem or persona focus, approach, cost/price level, strategy, other…).
Culling
- Filter the idea catalog by ruling out ideas/concepts that do not leverage the company’s core strengths and resources (consider capabilities such as marketing/sales, manufacturing/operations, capital, etc.), or that do not align with its strategy, positioning & brand.
Prioritizing
- Use techniques such as a scoring matrix, product/market factors mapping, or others to establish priority of the concepts that align well with business strengths, position, and goals.
Validation
- For top priority selections, clarify the assumptions (& unknowns) that must be validated (e.g.: market need/interest, business model, willingness to pay at a price, market size, adoption pattern across market cohorts, etc.).
- Identify how could the idea/concept be pretotyped (rudimentary early prototype) for validation, and how target stakeholders could be recruited to evaluate ideas/concepts.
- Conduct enough validation activities to test your key assumptions and fill-in the unknowns.
Conducting a workshop is a great way to get results quickly:
Jumpstart the process: Send Me Ideation/Prioritization Workshop Information