With a little help from a friend (thankyou Jon) I received the suggestion to create a grid as follows:
1. list the ideas
2. list the variables that would help determine successful candidates
3. score each idea for each variable
4. generate a weighted score
5. pick the best 3
Choice of important factors is perhaps personal, I have chosen 4:
1. Money - chance it'll make loadsamoney! Assuming it works.. see #3
2. Fun - will I have fun trying? This sort of includes satisfaction, interest, social etc
3. Product viability - can the product work?
4. Market viability - would anyone want it?
I then decided that two weighted scores are needed:
"survival" - the chance that the product will launch, and
"enthusiasm" - the chance that I won't get bored and give up
and that I would select one idea based on "survival" and two based on "enthusiasm"
So here's how the grid panned out:
| Invention | Money | Fun | Product viability | Market viability | Weighted score 3722 "enthusiasm" |
| Kiteflyte | 10 | 10 | 1 | 1 | |
| Napsec | 7 | 3 | 3 | 8 | |
| Kruba | 1 | 7 | 5 | 2 | |
| Starmorz | 3 | 7 | 7 | 5 | |
| Chatstats | 2 | 5 | 5 | 3 | |
| Munchmuch | 6 | 9 | 4 | 7 | |
| Bioalarm | 3 | 4 | 9 | 5 | |
| SysEntrop | 3 | 7 | 2 | 4 | |
| MiniMilk | 8 | 6 | 2 | 6 | |
| Compbox | 6 | 6 | 9 | 4 |
So I have selected the following 3 products: Kiteflyte, Munchmuch, and Compbox.
(these names are just labels which of course may change)
These three ideas will now move to the R&D phase, whilst the rest will sit on the shelf. There will be a review every month. The overall process might look something like this:
