What are the most effective ways to evaluate and select ideas generated in large group sessions?

Most important: be in the session where the ideas were generated. You can then ask for follow-ups and clarifications. If that wasn't possible, then it's still important to playback contributions to the people who made them to ensure you understand them fully. ie "When you said X... if I understand correctly you mean... " Otherwise there is a big risk of misinterpretation. Often in workshops people are given very little time and may hurry and create a contribution that is hard to understand or easy to misunderstand.

1. Before the brainstorming or idea-generation session, establishing clear criteria for evaluating ideas is an absolute go-ahead. For e.g. What are the most important factors or attributes that the ideas should meet? 2. We should encourage Diverse Input 3. We can use dot voting or ranking to prioritize ideas in real-time 4. Having a designated person or team responsible for documenting all generated ideas helps a lot. 5. Then collectively we can assess the feasibility, the constraints, the impact, the cost-benefit analysis, etc. 6. The risk associated with each idea having the possibility for acceptance should be evaluated with more attention. 7. And then finally after careful evaluation, we can proceed to final decision making.

Clusters of ideas may for during the session, these are good for discussion and building further thoughts, but don't get stuck in those clusters. Use your criteria and/or constraints as different lenses to regroup all the ideas, based on a particular lens. This will provide a selection of different insights. Normally there will be a number of ideas that float to the top under each lens. These may be the key opportunities to investigate further.

Dot Voting is indeed a popularly adopted method. And here is how it can help : 1)Efficient Prioritization: n a large group discussion, where numerous ideas may be generated, it helps participants focus on the most promising ones without extensive debate. 2)Visual Clarity: As participants place their dots on ideas, it becomes visually evident which ideas are gaining the most support. 3) Equal Participation: Each person typically receives a set number of dots to distribute among the ideas ensuring that less vocal participants have a say too. 4) Quick Feedback: Rather than waiting for a lengthy discussion or survey results, dot voting offers a rapid way to gauge which ideas resonate most with the group.

While dot voting is a useful tool, good for gathering a consensus, it is nearly always an opinion-based decision process and can be affected by unconscious bias.

Idea ranking is a fantastic way to make sense of a heap of ideas when you're working with a big group. Here are some great points to highlight why it's so useful: 1)Order from Chaos: Think of idea ranking as your trusted guide through a jungle of ideas. When you're dealing with a large group discussion and tons of creative suggestions, it can get overwhelming. Idea ranking helps you bring order to the chaos by giving each idea a clear place in the pecking order. 2)Deeper Deliberation: Instead of just picking favorites like in dot voting, idea ranking asks you to assign a value or rank to each idea. This prompts participants to weigh the pros and cons, consider the feasibility of each idea. It's like giving each idea a chance to shine.

In my experience the best selection is achieved with a three steps evaluation. Step 1 - Group similar ideas (this is better achieved by a small team of people, during a coffee break of the larger group) Step 2 - Each participant selects the ideas she/he wants to save. All the ideas without any vote are eliminated. Step 3 - A small team positions the selected ideas on a map according to 3 main dimensions: strategic importance, probability of success and potential economic value. A final decisor (or team) selects the ideas to move to the next stage.

In my experience, it is hard to create prototypes in a large group. A better result usually comes from splitting into smaller groups, each focused on one idea or opportunity. Keep it really simple to start with. Just pen and paper or the digital equivalent. The goal is to see if the ideas have legs. Prototypes don't need to be fully functioning. They could be a user journey, a sketched service plan or a press release. In the first instance, you're testing the ideas, not the execution. Each group should present their prototype and findings, both positive and negative, back to the whole, larger group.