The SCORE demonstration tool shown below is a “Beta” version of an idea grading instrument that is evolving and under current and continuous development. We have a limited number of clients who are helping to review and provide input on the tool and plan to have another version on-line at this location in early 2013. The tool shown below is fully functional for inputting a single idea at a time and creating a small population of ideas that can then be analyzed and evaluated to determine their utility. There are 6 steps identified below that are used to input the idea information. When the 6-step process has been completed you can easily identify any low hanging fruit which can be immediately implemented. If you would be interested in getting a web based version of the tool for evaluation please feel free to contact us.
SCORΣ Ideas Demonstration Tool
Step 1: Populating the Idea Field; by inserting your idea and its description into this field, you can begin to see and discuss with other team members what the idea is precisely about. This step helps create conceptual trigger words, for creating a mental model to help provide a grounded understanding of the idea for anyone reading the idea. Clarity is vitally important in this step, making sure everyone knows exactly what this idea is about (how it works in the greater system) to prevent linguistic problems that arise from different team member's personal syntax.
Step 2: Identifying Concept Category; the next step to explaining your idea is explaining where your idea fits into the greater picture, categorizing your idea allows you to easily see similar ideas, or ideas relating to the same area. In our water example we can see that two examples are categorized as public education, Internal Communication and Public communication.
Step 3: Idea Criteria, we explain the criteria the ideas are supposed to fit. In our example all of the ideas are staged for the ‘water availability’ criteria. Common criteria include Cost, Scheduling, Risk, and Reward. Our demo, only includes a single criterion but the full tool has a field for inputting multiple project requirements.
Since an idea can have a high rating in one field and a low rating in another, which is to be expected of complementary opposites like Cost/Schedule or Risk/Reward, the full tool will calculate the complexity factor, off of the importance of each relevant criterion and their individual scores, and creates a single weighted average score from it.
Step 4: Our next step is describing the sort of idea we’re dealing with. The tool has three columns labeled "A", "B", and "C"; standing for "A" (Low hanging fruit) "B" (Beginning of an idea) and "C" (Concept). If the idea is something simple, easy to implement, then you’d mark the "A" box. A "B" idea will have a solid grounding, but will require some work before it’s possible. Our "B" example would be a fictional company making 3D sculpts of their replacement parts available online for free. Which is wonderful for anyone with a 3D printer, but the at home/personal infrastructure doesn’t exist yet. This idea therefore needs to be coupled with a plan for increasing the number of 3D printers available to the general public. If our idea ends up being extremely complicated, and theoretical (antigravity for example) then we’re going to mark "C". These ideas can take years of development before they’d be usable, and generally rely on principles we haven’t fully developed.
Step 5: Our Complexity Factor, which for the demo only details a single criteria is a quantitative method for evaluating our ideas. This Complexity Factor section in the actual tool creates an average of the scores in each of the Idea criteria, but for our demonstration example details a single criteria. The scoring scale goes from 1 (which means simple) to 10 (which means quite complex). You will input manually your best intuitive guess of how the idea would be scored.
Step 6: Here we combine our A/B/C and our Complexity Factor, to create a single integrated score. The integrated score will look like A1, B5, C3, C9, etc. In the full tool, this feature is automatically populated from the previous steps, while this demo requires you to manually input them. Scanning left to right, you’ll determine which letter is associated with your idea, from step 4, and then combine the Complexity Factor from step 5. This will give you an estimation of what your idea is valued at. After inserting this information you will be able to sort it by clicking on ‘Idea Rank’. This process will then sort between the most likely/easiest ideas and the most complicated/difficult ones.