Evaluation Race

Why?

The purpose of the method is to narrow down the number of ideas after a brainstorming session to just a single idea. This often presents a challenge to the students who may end up with many good ideas from which they have to choose. This is not easy since the students can feel more attached towards their own ideas than towards other good ideas that they did not come up with themselves. This method enables a more neutral evaluation of ideas.

How?

The students write down a number of criteria from which the ideas should be evaluated. This can, for instance be according to the ideas’ novelty, complexity, challenges for implementation in existing markets, or price etc. After they have written down these criteria, they start to evaluate their ideas one by one by debating how well they perform against the different criteria. Based on this evaluation, each idea is given points according to each criterion on a scale from 1-5. At the end, all the points are added up and the idea with the best score is the winning idea.

Tips

The teacher asks the students to draw a racetrack with a piece of chalk: a car parking area would be a good place for this. They then divide the track into a number of sections that correspond to the number of ideas that they want to evaluate. The students can use themselves as representations of the different ideas. Thus, as the students debate their ideas, each student moves forward on the racetrack, according to the number of points that his or her idea is given in relation to a criterion. The first student that reaches the goal represents the winning idea in terms of the chosen evaluation criteria.

Literature

Dean, D. L., Hender, J. M., Rodgers, T. L., & Santanen, E. L. (2006). Identifying quality, novel, and creative ideas: Constructs and scales for idea evaluation. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 7(10), p. 646-699.