The sweet pain of having lots of ideas but not knowing which ones to pursue

밤하늘속으로 2025년 06월 12일

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There's always a happy squeal after a brainstorming session: "Wow, we've got so many ideas!" But the next moment is when the real struggle begins: staring at a whiteboard full of post-it notes and wondering, "What do we do now?"

My team ran a new business idea contest last year, and we received over 200 ideas. The problem was, we didn't have a clear methodology for "how do we narrow it down?" so we ended up relying on intuition and preference.

A few months later, when we ran the selected ideas, the results were shocking: the initially most popular ideas weren't actually feasible, and the ones that didn't get much attention were the ones that made the biggest impact. That's when we realized that the true value of creative ideas comes from a systematic selection process.

Prompt.

복사

Answer as an expert on screening creative ideas.

**Screening situation**.

- Idea field: [main area of ideas collected].

- Evaluation target: [number of ideas to be screened].

- Execution constraints: [available resources such as budget/time/people].

- Organizational goals: [direction of innovation to pursue]

**Designing a Multidimensional Screening System

Step 1: Feasibility Matrix

- Analyze technical difficulty vs. market acceptance on two axes

- Measuring expected impact versus required resources

- Evaluate the feasibility within the scope of [our organization's capabilities]

Step 2: Calculate Innovation Index

- Quantify the degree of differentiation from existing solutions

- Analyze market substitutability and disruptive innovation potential

- Estimating the difficulty of imitation and the durability of first-mover advantage

Step 3: Multi-perspective validation process

- Evaluation by stakeholders such as users/technicians/executives

- Review of rebuttal logic through Devil's Advocate

- Scenario planning to test the likelihood of success in various situations

Step 4: Portfolio optimization

- Balanced allocation of safe and challenging ideas

- Balance short-term performance with long-term investments

- Identify synergistic combinations of ideas

Provide evaluation templates and decision-making tools that are easy for the team to utilize.

After developing this systematic screening methodology and implementing it for six months, we saw some really amazing changes. The biggest one was a dramatic improvement in the accuracy of our idea screening: we were only getting 2-3 out of 10 ideas, and now we're getting 7-8 that perform as expected.

The key was to separate 'emotional appeal' from 'logical feasibility' - for example, ideas that initially felt like "wow, this is so innovative!" would be put through a feasibility matrix, which would reveal their realistic limitations.

The Devil's Advocate process was particularly effective, because having a deliberate naysayer for each idea revealed fatal weaknesses that the rest of the team had missed. By systematically analyzing "What are the biggest reasons this idea could fail?" we were able to prepare for risks before we executed.

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