Design a Better Business

Page 146

TOOL INNOVATION MATRIX

Your wall of ideas is filled with hundreds of ideas, and the time has come to make a selection. What are the really promising ideas? Use the Innovation Matrix and the ranking system on this page to filter out the best ideas.

FOCUS select ideas	± 45 MIN session	3–5 people per group

CATEGORIZE YOUR IDEAS

We humans are fantastic at categorizing things. We spend much of our professional lives categorizing and sub-categorizing the work we do. When it comes to pairing down your wall of ideas, a 2x2 matrix is a perfect tool to harness our innate ability to categorize.

The Innovation Matrix lays out rows delineating incremental and substantial changes and columns delineating reducing cost and increasing revenues. You can certainly use your own decision criteria for the rows and columns. Whatever criteria you choose, make sure they have clear distinctions that will help you organize your ideas and select the ones to move into prototyping and validation.

GO BIG OR GO HOME

This tool is designed to separate the ideas that result in incremental, easy-to-accomplish changes from the ones that will make a big difference. For instance, an idea to reduce costs ...