Evaluators

For your next stage you’ll need to identify evaluators.

Evaluators have core knowledge about the different business areas involved in your purpose-driven idea collection. They are able to understand the potential use-cases of incoming ideas and can help turn chaos into order.

KEY GOALS

Evaluators help you evaluate the commercial potential of incoming ideas. They help ensure that ideas pass through the idea management process correctly, fairly and efficiently.

They help filter out ideas that should not be advanced because they lack strategic fit, lack of resources, or are too similar to products or services that already exist or are in the pipeline.

Evaluators do not need to be decision makers or stakeholders but they do need expert knowledge on the feasibility of ideas.

Don’t involve too many evaluators. Innovation should stay lean. Try to go for minimum two and at most seven per evaluation step.

Having evaluators from different areas or teams not only ensures a more accurate evaluation, it also keeps the process fair and transparent for everyone.

You can recruit evaluators from anywhere in the organization. Just think about what types would be useful. A legal expert to check patents or legality. Someone from the communications department to see if the submission could be published. An expert on business models for, well, business model ideas.