Idea Screening - Blog 2

Idea Screening 

The first part of this blog is going to discus and define the concept of the term Idea Screening, the second part will go on to show how I have screened my ideas and what tools were used.

According to Law, 2009 idea screening is the process of “screening new-product ideas in order to identify and develop good ideas and drop poor ones as soon as possible”. McDaniel, Lamb and Hair, 2011 describe the process as a way to eliminate ideas that have been proposed by discarding ideas that don’t fit the organisations aims and goals. Whereas Kotler and Armstrong, 2012 suggest that Idea screening is only a basic filtering process but ensures large costs are avoided.

These definitions suggest that the process of idea screening is to filter out the ideas that don’t have the potential to work, the stage is important in the new product development process because it helps companies save lots of resources, most importantly time and money. If the company can cut down the number of ideas and focus all their resources and efforts into one idea it is more likely to be successful than if they try to split their resources of a number of ideas.

To screen ideas companies often set a range of criteria questions and score each idea in relation to the how they meet the criteria. These questions can be anything from, cost of production for the company? Size of the target market? Is it technically feasible to manufacture / provide?

These results can be easily compared and calculated using a decision making matrix, this helps to rank ideas clearly and helps to indicate the better business idea over the idea that people may favour originally as you can weight each criteria on what’s most important to the company. 

This video link shows how to make a decision making matrix on Excel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy4cX34U87Y

I used this tool to help me decide on which idea I should chose and follow through with. I used the Criteria of cost to provide the service, Patentability of the new sport concept, Profit potential of the sport, the health and safety risk of playing the sport and the accessibility to the public. As you can see in Appendix (A) each category has been weighted between 1 and 3 which helps indicate the importance of each category score. Each idea is then scored 1-100 in each category and the matrix creates a weighted score and ranks the ideas highest to lowest.

The matrix has indicated to me that my Archball Idea is the best idea I have come up with and that it should be the most commercially successful out of the three.

Appendix

A

References

·       Kotler, P. and Armstrong, G. (2012) Principles of Marketing 14th Editionn. London: Pearson Education.

·       Mcdaniel, C.D. Lamb, C.W. and Hair J.F. (2011) Introduction to Marketing 11th Edition. Ohio: South-Western Cengage Learning.

·       Law , J (2009) A Dictionary of Business and Management 5^th Edition, Oxford :Oxford University Press