Pick the winners from your ideas portfolio

So, you’ve got loads of ideas and need a way to work out which ones are the winners. After all, you don’t have the resources to develop more than a few of them and you can’t afford to pick the wrong ones!

These situations call for a rigorous system through which ideas can be funnelled. Think of it like panning for gold. The gold panner is very careful about discarding anything that might be of value and washes his ore several times to improve it. This is the kind of approach we take, a “multi-stage/gate process”. But we have an advantage over the gold panner: we can be alchemists! Each time we “wash” ideas, those that survive can be creatively improved to help them achieve their full potential.