Screening and assessing ideas

May 9, 2019

By Cat Halthur

In my experience, assessment of potential ideas within my organisation(s) has been left to a board of directors, or people with a similar, but less formal, role within the department. Commonly, these have been people regarded as experts within a specific field of knowledge, and they have been assumed to make “a rational decision to assess the feasability”, ie to use their expertise to assess the producability and the profitability. Seeing as the process has been very informal and “ad-hoc”, in reality they have used a mix of system 1 (intuition) and system 2 (rationality) to make their decision, but all under the flag of “Rationality”. The criterias that could be measured has been producability and profitability, and possibly the strategy fit, but their intuitive notion of the ideas originality, user value and fit of the scope/values of the organisation has been key in wether or not to give the idea “go”, or to simply discharge it.

Of course this means that the success of the assessment has been left to the hope that the decision-makers have been good at pattern recognition, and that they have been generalists or creators, and not rationalists (without opportunity to get more information) or dispatchers (out of their waters).

Hopefully this will change!