Each week, the Pollenizer team needs to review many ideas for web businesses. Here is a simple process that we are using that you may also find useful.

Our process is a mash-up of a business process and a blog post.

The Process

Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich wrote an excellent book called ‘Innovation Tournaments’. It describes a useful and simple process of assessing many ideas from inside and outside a company and determining which will bring the best return on investment. As the name suggests, ideas fight for survival in a tournament that is a repeatable process which does not cripple the idea. There is also a website here: http://innovationtournaments.com/

We liked the principles behind this but we also needed a framework for how we interrogate each idea in our world of web business startups…

The Questions

I love the brain of Evan Williams (Twitter co-founder) because he is a practical entrepreneur with the discipline to peel away the hype to understand the true, simple mechanics of a web business.

Ev wrote a blog post called How to Evaluate a New Product Idea that we have been using to interrogate our ideas in the tournaments.

Here is the form we use:

Idea Tournament

Feel free to use it yourself. This is a publicly shared version of an editable form for you to take and remix yourself.

Have fun!