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How to Evaluate Ideas
By Jeffrey
Baumgartner

Many organizations make mistakes in their idea review processes that result in rejecting the most potentially innovative ideas in favor of less innovative ones, warns Jeffrey Baumgartner. Here are some ways to avoid this unfortunate fate.
Organizational innovation is not just about generating creative business ideas. It is also about reviewing ideas in order to identify those which are most likely to become successful innovations. Unfortunately, many organizations make mistakes in their idea review processes that result in rejecting the most potentially innovative ideas in favor of less innovative ones.
In some instances, the idea review process is a simple matter of a manager reading through a batch of ideas and selecting those she believes will work best for her firm. This is most often the case in smaller firms run by a single owner and manager. In most medium to large businesses, however, a structured evaluation process is necessary in order to:
Identify the ideas that are most likely to succeed as innovations for the company.
Ensure that complex ideas are reviewed by people with the appropriate expertise necessary to understand what would be necessary to implement the idea – and what might go wrong.
Enable a middle manager to defend the idea to senior management, stakeholders, and financial officers who may need to grant budgetary approval of the idea.
Make it possible to review a large number of ideas in a resource efficient manner.
Improve the idea by identifying potential implementation problems and preparing suitable actions to overcome those problems. Sadly, this last aspect is often lost in formal idea review procedures.

Methods
There are all kinds of idea review methods. We will