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The Innovation Process
Activity 4.2 F

Select an idea

The exercises in this activity will help you sort through your ideas and identify the most promising ideas that you want to take forward to concept development.

Once you have gone through the previous steps you will need to further narrow down and identify the most promising ideas you want to take forward to concept development.  In this activity we provide two exercises to help you sort your ideas and identify those most likely to succeed. For both exercises it is worth thinking about how you might involve users in prioritising and selecting ideas.

Bundle Ideas

Bundling Ideas encourages you to cluster similar ideas together, identify the best aspects of those ideas, and then combine different clusters of ideas into bundles. These then become themes that can use to start building concepts. As IDEO suggest in their Design Kit: “Think of it as a game of mix and match, with the end goal of putting the best parts of several ideas together to create more complex concepts.”

Narrow the Set

Once you have bundled your ideas into themes, it is time to judge which ones you want to take forward. Narrow the Set involves agreeing criteria to assess the ideas before ranking or judging them. You can use the design criteria in your Challenge Brief as the basis for your assessment, supplemented by any additional criteria you may have hit upon during ideation activities. Frog Design’s Collective Action Toolkit provides some further guidance on carrying out this activity on p50.