What is Idea Screening ?

Idea screening is a process that evaluates and contrasts new product ideas to get the most promising ones for your business. Not every idea is relevant to your company. In order to screen out a good idea from the not so good ones, there are certain criteria that should be followed like technical problems, strategic fit, and several market opportunities. Due to scarcity of available resources, it’s difficult to develop several products at the same time. Through a successful idea screening process, it helps in focusing the whole product development process with a higher possibility of achieving success.

The idea screening process helps to reduce the amount of irrelevant ideas into a convenient amount which can further turned into prototypes. The purpose is to eliminate the number of ideas without screening away the potential ones. During the idea screening process, the company must focus on the following questions:

•    If the target customers will benefit from the product?

•    What will be the size and growth forecast of the target market?

•    The current and future competitive pressure for the product idea?

•    Is it technically possible to manufacture the product

•    Is the product idea based on current market trend?

•    Whether the product idea will be profitable when delivered to the target customers?

•    The most identifiable needs/wants of the customers.

•    Product’s improvement or modification required.

•    The scope of the research and development needed.

•    Whether it fits best with business’s objective.

Many companies suffer from a flood of generating new ideas when they are unable to prioritize them. Quantitative idea screening helps to identify those ideas that distinguish between greatest interest and greatest prospective for future growth of the business.

[large]The quantitative idea screening aims to filter out which ideas are worth considering and emerging. This process involves a lot of testing of different ideas and themes and that’s how it gets important to make certain that this is done cost effectively and efficiently. Therefore, most companies perform idea screening online.

The purpose behind doing the idea screening is to determine the interest in those ideas and to find out which segment of the whole population can be easily attracted towards the product idea. For this step, a survey is conducted to ensure the uniqueness of the new idea which is associated with the product and whether it will enable to generate any switching behavior.

The advantage of carrying out a survey is that it has a diagnostic element that allows the respondents to give feedbacks on what they find appropriate and appealing in a new product idea. As a result, it is essential to reshape new ideas and reassess their appealing elements before elimination.

Idea screening is performed in different stages. Firstly, the ideas are examined to know if they are relevant to the basic objective of the company, if there are certain constraints factors in which the product idea might get crucial in a sequence, drop that idea immediately. The rest of the ideas are being scored against each other considering the important factors, after totaling the score the lower scoring ideas are dropped. The idea screening is the initial idea to assign resources to the product idea and decides whether the new product development should start or not.