In Innovation Cloud’s September 2019 release, we improved our score report for efficient prioritization of ideas and better decision-making. In order to understand how our score report will assist you in the decision-making process of selecting the right ideas to further develop and implement, let’s start by explaining the evaluation phase within the idea management process.

First step – idea generation

The idea generation is usually the easiest part of idea management that comes with a lot of fun. If the topic of idea collection is set correctly and accompanied by a reward, employees will be motivated to participate in the process and give their contribution. The hard part comes when an organization has to decide which ideas should be invested in and implemented and, to do that properly, you will need clear and measurable indicators to understand which ideas are ready to be moved further through the innovation process. After the ideas have been collected and filtered out, an evaluation process is needed to ensure that the “right” and most profitable ideas are chosen for implementation.

How can a company ensure that the ideas selected for implementation are the ones with the highest potential?

In order to pick the best ideas the crucial step is to set the right criteria by which the ideas will be assessed and to delegate proper team responsible for evaluating the ideas. Idea evaluation through scoring techniques represents a measurable way to evaluate collected ideas. The main aim of scoring is to evaluate an idea in accordance to several factors or criteria relevant for your organization. Usually, the idea evaluation is carried out on the basis of multidisciplinary knowledge of diverse experts, who have a role of idea evaluators in the idea management process.

How to define the right scoring criteria for idea evaluation?

Boston Consulting Group has found that almost 60 % of companies rely on five or fewer criteria to measure innovation, preferring to score higher those that relate closely to profitability, time to market, and quality of idea submission. Innovation Cloud enables you to set criteria to evaluate ideas through scoring by considering company-specific objectives and success factors of the product development process. It is very easy to create your own list of questions and criteria suitable for your company and your type of business. You just need to consider values, goals and vision of your company and ask what are the essential features of the ideas submitted, important for your company to assess the value of ideas. The main advantage of idea scoring lies in its quantitative approach that breaks down scoring criteria into numbers, enabling your decision-makers to understand the real value and potential of the idea. 

What happens after the idea scorers evaluate all ideas?

After all the ideas have been evaluated, our improved scoring report will provide real-time, actionable intelligence for your decision-makers. It is a more interactive tool than a simple score report, because it highlights the degree of idea scorer’s alignment and visualizes the evaluated ideas strength and weakness with regards to the criteria that is the most relevant for you and your organization. You will be able to understand the idea value by comparing different metrics such as aggregated score, average scores, standard deviations and number of users that scored the idea, combining this information with your predefined scoring criteria. The scoring report allows you to quickly sort ideas using different metrics and identify ideas’ strengths and weaknesses. 

Scoring report allows the decision-makers to understand and select best ideas by:

1. Prioritizing ideas in accordance with listed criteria,
2. Evaluating and comparing different solutions,
3. Selecting the best matching solution.

Unlike other scoring reports, you will be able to set a range for all of the criteria provided. This way you will identify and dedicate resources only for the ideas that satisfy the desired range. 

You can also sort the ideas by minimum and maximum value of each criteria as well as to compare ideas based on that value. It will automatically rank the ideas based on the sorting you selected, thus immediately identifying the ideas with the highest potential within the desired scope and enabling you to select the best investing opportunities. Or, you can simply observe each scoring criteria of an idea by analyzing the visual representation of the relevant criteria on the spider chart. 

Our scoring report is an evaluation tool for improving and facilitating the decision-making process as the final and the most important step of the idea management process by providing detailed information based on various criteria and indicators set in accordance with the overall company strategy.