Protected: Evaluating Ideas
How do you evaluate your own ideas? Ideas from others? New technologies? This tool will help you evaluate ideas for further enhancement or integration.
I’ve seen it called PIN (Positive-Interesting-Negative), PMI (Pluses, Minuses, Interesting), and ALUo (Advantages, Limitations, Unique Qualities, Overcome limitations). All of them have the same basic format.
For each idea, assess:
1. What ADVANTAGES, or positives, are associated with the idea?
2. What is NOVEL about the idea, what is interesting or unique about it that sets it apart from the rest?
3. What DISADVANTAGES, or negatives, are associated with the idea? And how can we mitigate the disadvantages?
By putting advantages FIRST, it forces you and others find something of value in every idea. If the idea doesn’t survive, perhaps the advantages of the approach can be used in another way.
Often disadvantages can be mitigated by combine complementary ideas, or making simple enhancements. If a disadvantage is hard to mitigate it might signal the idea isn’t worth pursuing at this time.
By placing the results of your assessment in a matrix or spreadsheet, you can better visualize a prioritization. This is also a good method to get feedback from others on your ideas - collect the AND input from as many as you can to help identify potential problems and ways to mitigate.
