The human side of idea screening

Abstract: In extant research, idea screening has been viewed as a gate where ideas for innovations are evaluated and selected for further development. Given that organizations have limited resources, and cannot implement all of the ideas, idea screening acts as a bottleneck during the innovation process. Thus far, research studies have mainly focused on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of idea screening through e.g. crowdsourcing, improving its accuracy, and even developing algorithms that mimic human evaluations. However, this pursuit of technical and procedural optimization has only reinforced the perception of idea screening as a strict decision gate, limiting our understanding of this phenomenon. Consequentially, this has led to a gap between how idea screening is portrayed by research and what is happening during screening. The aim of this study is thus to explore idea screening from the evaluator’s perspective in order to enrich our current understanding of this phenomenon and to reduce the gap between theory and practice. The methodological approach used was inspired by mixed methods research, and the empirical base consisted of a total of 1,305 idea screening cases performed by 245 people, focusing on technology-based ideas for innovations. The findings showed that evaluators did not just evaluate and select ideas for further development, but were engaged in generative activities that helped them to understand ideas and envision their future potential. This indicated that idea screening is not a strict decision gate, but is also a stage where ideas can be refined. The findings propose a change of logic as regards how to understand idea screening, and how to find ideas of high quality, i.e. good ideas are not created during idea generation, and then discovered during screening, they are instead created by the evaluators during screening. Recognising this opens up new opportunities for capturing activities that can improve screening.