Page 117 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

58/32. THE 7 x 7 TECHNIQUE

Another way to improve the utilization of new ideas is the
7 x 7 technique, a series of exercises designed to process, or-
ganize and evaluate idea slips that have been mounted on a
racking board in seven rows and seven columns (or more, if
needed).48 Carl Gregory, who developed this technique, sug-
gests that the following steps can help you make sense of all
your ideas. You might use suggestions for this technique
with a similar process, storyboarding (see Chapter 5):

1. Combine similar ideas.
2. Exclude irrelevant data.
3. Modify ideas to reflect insights gained in the first two steps.
4. Defer extraneous data for future reference.
5. Review past exercises to identify possibilities for alteration

or refinement.
6. Classify dissimilar groupings into separate columns.
7. Rank items in each column.
8. Generalize each column using its main idea as a heading

or title.
9. Rank the columns from left to right on the racking board

according to their importance or utility.

Brief explanations of these steps follow.

Combine

When you have at least two racking boards filled with idea
slips or when your pile of ideas is exhausted, read each idea
bit carefully. Discard any redundant information and com-
bine similar ideas. Give each grouping of related ideas a
title.

Exclude

Exclude all things that are not related to the objective of the
exercise or are too "far out" for present consideration. Put
the excluded ideas into another pile for later use.

Modify

Where necessary, write new statements of ideas that have
been modified as a result of the first two steps.

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