A very good post by Twitter‘s CEO, Evan Williams, with more than 2 years already, on alternative ways he came up to assess ideas. Excerpt:
“Tractability
Question: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
Blogger was highly tractable. Twitter was tractable, but sightly less-so because of the SMS component. Google web search had quite low tractability when they launched it. Vista?: About as low as you can get.”
Read the full article – it’s worth it:
http://evhead.com/2007/12/how-to-evaluate-new-product-idea.asp
by David McCann – CFO.com | US
February 10, 2010
“Motorola uses a prediction-market variant to determine which among thousands of employee-submitted ideas merit a further look.
In 2003 Motorola rolled out a system through which employees could propose ideas for products or anything else that might boost the company's value. By one measure it was an unqualified success: it produced 10,000 ideas over the next four years.
But the volume of submissions to the system, called Think Tank, overwhelmed the review boards that were set up to vet the ideas. A backlog swelled, and missed opportunities abounded. In one case, a competitor brought out a product with features that had been suggested by a Motorola employee years earlier [...]”
via Crowd Control – Business Intelligence – CFO.com.
Illustration by Lars Leetaru
A very good article by Zia Khan and Jon Katzenbach at Strategy+Business on the fact that some (bad) ideas should have been killed but actually weren’t. Take a look at this introduction:
““Why don’t we have enough good ideas? How can we tell which idea is going to be the next big thing? Why is it so hard to get an idea from the drawing board into the market?” Most telling of all is the question: “Why do we still waste resources on ideas that people don’t believe in?” In other words, even though an idea has been effectively “killed,” it still remains on the agenda, with nobody fully willing to learn from the mistake, put it to rest, and move on to other endeavors.”
Read the full article:
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09303?pg=all
