Idea evaluation – What is it and how should one do it?

For managers and executives, evaluating new ideas can be daunting and complex. Prioritizing ideas and implementing them can pose a challenge, given the uncertainty and lack of data that comes with new ideas. Idea evaluation is important to both innovation management and idea management, but choosing the right evaluation method can be difficult. Transparency, having a systematic set of criteria, and treating incremental and disruptive ideas separately can make the evaluation process work better. Evaluation should be treated as a tool for making decisions, not a decision-making system, and should be done using a team effort or an individual decision depending on the idea’s complexity. Having a simple but effective process for collecting ideas, and evaluating and prioritizing them, is important in the entire innovation process.