As innovation becomes more and more of a household name, many companies have learned the lessons of creativity. They have become good at creating ideas. Loads of ideas. Now they face the challenge; what to do with such an overabundance of ideas – obvious bright ideas as well as ideas not so obviously bright. Innovation is much more than just creating ideas, as many companies will acknowledge. Following the ecstatic poster sessions where the flow of creativity seems never ending, the resulting list of ideas far too often end up as anonymous files on some computer, slowly disappearing under layers of digital dust.

Perhaps a single idea is pushed forward as the idea; meaning the idea considered worthwhile to pursue. But what about the rest? Good for nothing and a waste of time? Most likely not! Yet many companies I have talked to over the past months still lack the ability to perform a quick analysis of ideas needed in order to prioritize them before archiving. The challenge is to perform a kind of benchmarking of the ideas with an appropriate level of detail and in the correct context, while keeping an overview. Few have tools to carry out such benchmarking – and that’s really a pity! Prioritizing the ideas, realizing when to move from idea to concept design and further on to development, implementation and marketing is a core value of the innovation process.