Saturday, January 4, 2014

How to prioritise ideas?

With so many ideas on the table, how to choose which to work on? With zero scientific aplomb, I decided 3 is a good number of ideas to be working on at any one time. But which 3 would require a little more thought...

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:


InventionMoneyFunProduct viabilityMarket viabilityWeighted score 7355 "survival"Weighted score 3722 "enthusiasm"
Kiteflyte1010115.07.4
Napsec73385.34.6
Kruba17523.14.7
Starmorz37755.05.9
Chatstats25533.44.1
Wheg48755.46.6
Munchmuch69475.97.4
Bioalarm34955.04.6
SysEntrop37243.55.0
MiniMilk86265.35.9
Proffa36423.34.5
Compbox66946.06.1


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: