Idea Harvesting and Treatment

This phase of the innovation project ends by filtering ideas and narrowing them down to the few that are the best candidates for further development. See the KJ Method, Idea Harvesting and Treatment, and Six Thinking Hats to help you converge on the concepts that are ripest for commercialization. 

Once the team has completed ideating after all the questions, review the list for duplications. Combine similar ideas, but don t discard any at this point. You can use a technique such as KJ Method (Technique 27) or Idea Harvesting and Treatment (Technique 28) to evaluate the feasibility of each idea. 

Labeling categories helps the team evaluate the suggestions from a thematic or system perspective. Plus, if the categories translate to concepts, the team can generate additional ideas using Idea Harvesting and Treatment (Technique 28). 

Idea Harvesting and Treatment is a simple and effective way to make your ideas more practical and viable, as well as more appealing to those who are funding the innovation project (your stakeholders). After you ve generated dozens of ideas for a better battery, do you just throw out the notion of making the battery biodegradable, or can you hnd some value in the idea ... 

What about your other ideas Are they immediately applicable or do you need to overcome some constraints, such as cost, time, resources, or perception Idea Harvesting and Treatment can help you answer these questions and subsequently choose the best ideas from your list for further development. 

Scenario Let s say that your organization has a new innovation deployment. Your team has generated a list of ideas for publicizing the program s success both internally and externally. You can use Idea Harvesting and Treatment to organize and further refine these ideas. 

When you ve finished Idea Harvesting and Treatment, you should have increased the yield of viable ideas that can become solutions for your innovation opportunity. You can further evaluate these ideas using techniques like Six Thinking Hats (Technique 29) or Pugh Matrix (Technique 36). 

Increase the yield of ideas and concepts by filling in any blanks on the Idea Harvesting matrix. Can you turn a beginning idea into a specific idea Try to do this for all beginning ideas. If you get stuck, flag the idea for later treatment (see steps below). Also consider if you have articulated all the concepts and broad concepts behind the idea. Filling in these blanks may help you view the innovation opportunity from a different perspective, leading to more ideas (Exhibit 28.2). 

This plant was the new growth off the remainder of a root of a plant that was rashly pulled the year before. On contact it rejected the idea of the root being harvested, and implied that it would not go well for being used if it was harvested, due to previous treatment. The plant agreed that its seeds could be harvested when they were ripe. The plant directed me towards the Parsley plant more suitable. (This plant is the subject in example two.)... 

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