Now let's get to the hardest part, and also something that is often not done. It's, it's skipped, by teams that are looking at, at ideas, a lot of ideas as well as as digging deeper in some ideas. And that is how you're going to measure the rating for each factor. What is a five? For it's very clear the product we're going to sell. How are you going to give yourself a perfect score on that, a five, if we use here a score of one, two, three and four and five really need to talk about as objectively as possible what makes up a five on each of these factors, a lot of strong protection. What makes up a five? What's the perfect score? How are you going to measure that it's strong protection? As you read through these factors and you think about defining that perfect five as objectively as possible, some of them are quite easy, it's quite easy to be objective and numbers driven. So, sales. The perfect idea is going to be able to reach a billion dollars. That's measurable. Or it's a $50 million idea. It might be a five for other teams. Other factors are pretty hard to define the perfect score. Like our we are ready willing experts. You know, how are you going to measure that? Maybe it's in the amount of hours that you're able to dedicate to a team, or something like that. After you go through and find out these perfect scores, you should go through and define what is a weak score. What would score a one for you? Obviously the extremes are not that helpful if you say well, we all we want to billion dollars and a one would be we lose money. So try to define that a little bit more, a little bit more objectively. What are the boundaries around the scoring that you're going to do. And especially it's easiest to usually just start out with defining the five, the perfect answer. Ideas that meet this criteria are going to get a five. And then the one. The other extreme. These ideas, we would consider to be quite bad. And the threes. You go right down the center and say, well it's kind of an average idea. Not so important to spend a lot of time on the, the twos and the fours. Some of these are nice continuums, so it's quite easy to throw em in if you spending a lot of time trying to tell the difference between what's a two versus a one and a three, it's probably not worth it. Just, just leave it blank. Here's an example. And not really meant to, to, to see, see everything there exactly but let me just talk through a few highlights. But your filter as it gets built out might look something like this. Right? So we have these, we have these factors down here. And over here we're trying to define what is a one. What is, what is a five, all right? So let me just highlight uh,uh,uh, a little bit of what this might look like. So is it unique and protectable? Do we have a lot of protection? Yes. We have issued patents, we have some pending patents, we've done a third party assessment for freedom to operate. We've done some assessments as to the, to the strength of our broad claims, and, and how, how much of a portfolio protection we have that might be a five. Now that might be pretty steep. Right? You might, you might on your team say that's that's pretty hard to get a five. We don't need that much level of protection. Maybe, if we have one, one pending patent that's going to be a five. Or you might put that you know, you might put that over here and say well we've started the patenting process. We, we've had some research going on for a number of years. We have a couple of, of patents that are, that have been submitted starting to be prosecuted. We have some office actions, things like that. Way over here, you might say we don't, we don't have any protection, really we don't expect it. This, this type of idea, you can't really expect any kind of protection for that. We talked a little about about the the idea is big enough. How many, how, what's the market size. So you might look at your, your ranges. The total addressable market. What, how big of an addressable market do you need? Obviously, that's, that's a little bit linked in with how easy it's going to sell, to sell and get, get share. How much share you're going to get. You can do some thinking around which is more important, a gigantic market size or a small one that's growing, or a medium size one that you can get a lot of share. The answers are important, but even more important is the thinking that you are doing and the conversations you're having with your team that really start to, to ask some of these questions. How are people going to measure success is what you're really looking at here, so that when three different ideas come in, you can be somewhat aligned on the one idea is, that is the best for your team. Just want to keep in mind, again, that there's no ideal idea. So you're never going to have a, a filter that gets filled out with all fives. That, that just doesn't exist. If it, if it, if you end up with that, it means you're not being realistic. So the concept of a hurdle is important. And step five is to think a little about a hurdle. I think it's not as, it's not the most important part of your idea filtering system, but you might, you might want to include it. Some of the more innovative companies that have innovation systems that they've been using for a number of years, they build in some hurdles. And the basic concept here is if we can't get an idea on paper and at the early stages, if we can't even get it over a certain score, let's stop working on it because it's got too many problems or it, it doesn't fit with us very well. So let's stop working on that idea. You, you might think of a couple of hurdles, one that you put at about 50%, put at 50% of your maximum score, call that the low hurdle. Maybe early on it's okay that an idea is above the low hurdle say yeah, that's probably worth looking into some more. Later on you have your high hurdle about at 75% of your maximum and ideas had better be shaped to get above that high hurdle or you might want to ask yourself why are you still working on it? It's guidance especially if you have a lot of ideas and if you have a history of bringing ideas and managing innovation forward. So it's a quick sorting mechanism for, for you. Entrepreneurs in garages don't necessarily use this kind of a system very much and then they, they they're, they're not generally looking at a whole portfolio of ideas and they don't have the history to know whether they ought to give up at a certain point or not.
