Insights | Innovation

Read why you shouldn't vote on the good ideas and how criteria-based prioritization ensures that you choose the best ideas.

If you have been involved in choosing between ideas in a brainstorming or ideation session, you may have experienced doubts about whether the ideas selected on the day are actually the best ones.

One of the reasons could be that you conducted a voting process for the ideas, such as having participants rank or score the different proposals.

Regardless of the format, there are several disadvantages to voting.

Firstly, you often have to choose between very different proposals that may be difficult to rank or directly compare.

Secondly, participants' votes are unconsciously influenced by their intuition, the atmosphere in the room, and a variety of factors that may not necessarily indicate the best idea, such as:

- who gave the most impressive presentation
- which proposal sounded the most optimistic
- who suggested it
- and, most importantly, what happens to be occupying the participant's mind that day

This means that the result of the vote is uncertain. Therefore, you may have also experienced doubts being raised about the choices made, whether by participants, colleagues, or management. This can create a lot of noise and additional work, and, in the worst case, the whole process may lose momentum.

If you want to increase validity and ensure that the group chooses solutions that are best for the company, you should use clear criteria to evaluate and select the ideas. Criteria that systematically assess the value and feasibility of the ideas. This neutralizes the disadvantages of voting and provides a robust and effective method for choosing between many different proposals. At the same time, you gain a high level of confidence that the group is identifying the most valuable ideas. Finally, it becomes clear to everyone why those specific ideas were chosen.

Criteria-based prioritization is an integral part of the Benelizer® Innovation Workshop, and you can also learn more about the method in one of our master classes.