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1775 : STEP THREE – EVALUATING AND SELECTING IDEAS

and those which focus on you as a person. Both of these broad
categories contain a number of headline questions, as shown in Table
5.5. The following sections explore these headline questions. In relation
to your personal circumstances and outlook discussed in the later
sections, we also offer some simple diagnostic tools to increase your
self-awareness.

Table 5.5 Headline criteria for evaluating business ideas

Business-focused criteria

G Existence of viable market opportunity
G Practical feasibility
G Ability to protect the idea
G Financial viability
G Level of risk

Person-focused criteria

G Type and scale of your ambition
G What resources can you access?
G What’s your attitude to risk?

As with all the steps within the idea development process, the step of
selecting and evaluating business ideas combines right-brain insightful
thinking with left-brain analytical thinking. This step is not the purely
logical exercise in left-brain thinking suggested by the traditional model
of new idea development which ‘front-loads’ creativity into the initial
stage only and throws all subsequent stages over the wall for the left-
brained analysts and planners to complete. We described the limitations
of this model in Chapter 2. It would be no use undertaking the most
complex analytical weighting exercise if the criteria used were
inappropriate, for example. In fact, the selection of assessment criteria
will benefit from intuitive and imaginative thinking precisely because
the criteria will tend to vary from person to person and from
opportunity to opportunity.

business-focused criteria The business-focused headline

criteria against which to evaluate and select the various business ideas
reflect to a large extent the fundamental questions which any
subsequent business plan will require you to answer in more detail. At
this stage of the process, however, you are interested in using ball-park
figures to guide your decision making. As we discuss below, you should
feel comfortable in making the type of simplifying assumption which
allows you to see the bigger picture.