How to Refine and Develop Ideas – The Doer’s Guide

As we’re in the business of providing a platform for?collecting and developing ideas, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that we often get asked about the process of refining and developing ideas.

So, we’ve put together this guide that covers the fundamentals of the topic and provides you with actionable advice on how to get this right based on our experiences from working with hundreds of our customers.

What does it mean to refine or develop an idea?

An idea, by definition, is a thought or a suggestion for a course of action. So, a raw idea that someone has just come up with, can be thought of?as a theory, or a hypothesis?based on that person’s perceptions and opinions. At this stage, ideas are typically, but not always, very high level.

A refined, or fully develop idea, on the other hand, is?a fully fledged out concept, or a concrete plan that can actually be implemented. The last part of that sentence is the key here: an idea is just a theory until it has been refined into something that could actually be implemented.

How to refine or develop an idea?

There are two parts to this question: the process, and the tools.

Let’s first break down the process to understand the big picture, and then dive in to cover some of the tools we can use to carry the process out.?

The process of developing the idea

Different kinds of ideas are going to need different kinds of input. As an example, a technology focused idea will likely need input for validating the technical feasibility and architecture whereas a business focused idea will likely need input for market validation.

With that background, it should hopefully be quite evident why the actual steps in the?process of developing both ideas?should be very different.

Regardless, if we take a step back and look at the big picture, we can see that there are many commonalities in that process. At a high-level, these common steps are:

1. Get feedback and evaluate the idea.?Preferably from diverse points of view and people who can look at the idea objectively and critically.
2. Refine the idea into something more practical?based on the feedback. In most cases, this is something like a project plan, a business case, or a product concept.
3. Test assumptions in the real world to remove uncertainty.?For most ideas, this is a crucial but often neglected step. Every idea comes with assumptions built-in, such as “we can build this” and “people will buy this”. It is important to figure out what your assumptions are, and then eliminate the biggest and most obvious ones.
4. Rinse and repeat.?For simple ideas, it might be enough to go through the above steps once and then be done with it, but for more complex ideas, that just isn’t feasible. You will need to go through the process multiple times, with each iteration gradually refining the idea into something that is useful and practical.

To summarize, the purpose of the process is to:

1. refine the idea into a more practical plan or concept
2. eliminate uncertainty from the plan or concept by testing it

In theory, the more tangible and detailed the plan, and the less question marks it has, the better. However, if you try to refine the idea to perfection, you will never get to implement any of them.

So, in practice, you should seek to make the idea clear and cohesive enough, have some kind of a plan for implementing it, and not have way too much uncertainty?–?whatever those mean for the kind of ideas you are working on.

Tools for developing ideas

It’s important to remember that even the best tools can’t make bad ideas, or a bad process, great. However, great tools make your life a lot easier, so you should definitely be using them.

Let’s cover some of the most common and some of our favorite tools for refining and developing ideas for each of the categories.

Feedback and evaluation

For feedback and evaluation, you’re looking at tools that help you effortlessly expose your idea to others, be it people within your organization, or outside of it.

Feedback is the more free-form side of that, whereas evaluation is the more systematic and tightly controlled version. The traditional methods like?watercooler conversations?with your colleagues, ideation?workshops, and for customers,?focus groups,?all have their place.

In addition, you can use online tools, such as?surveys, and purpose-built?idea management software, which have the added advantage of being independent of time and place. These dramatically expand your feasible audience, and with the exception of those watercooler conversations, typically save a lot of time and money while still allowing you to collect and analyze the data systematically.

Refinement of an idea

Where feedback and evaluation were social activities, the actual refinement and development of the idea is primarily a solitary process.

Here the tools are primarily?frameworks, scorecards and templates.

For example, something like the?Business Model Canvas,?Lean Canvas,?or the?Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas, are very useful frameworks fledging out new product or business ideas into a more holistic concept.

For other kinds of ideas, simple methods like?Opposite Thinking, the?Five Whys, and?User Stories?can really help you here. You can also use these methods, along with frameworks like the?Strategy Choice Cascade, to try to clarify the assumptions you’re making in your idea.

If none of these seems like a good fit for the kinds of ideas you’re working on, you can also create a simple canvas or template to do the same job. The purpose here is to make it effortless for anyone that comes up with an idea to think about the right questions and come up with a plan for addressing them. A good idea management software will naturally allow you to attach these results to your ideas.

Prototyping and validating assumptions

The final part of the process, validating your assumptions in the real world, actually consists of two separate parts.

First, you must?build something to test. If you try to test and validate your business concept or plan by directly asking for feedback for those, the end result is usually that you won’t learn much. The whole point of?validation?is to?focus on testing a specific assumption, usually the most critical or riskiest one, and in most situations that is very hard to do with a concept.

As an example: you can, of course present a potential customer with a concept and ask if they’d want to pay for that. However, most people don’t want to hurt your feelings, so they end up saying yes or maybe, even if they don’t really plan on buying your product or service.

However, present the same customer with a landing page detailing the concept that asks them to pre-order now with a small reservation fee, and you’ll get a much more realistic answer to the same question.

So, the first step is preparing the test, and the second one is conducting that. As the latter is highly dependent on the type of business and idea, there isn’t much we can share there.

However, for the first part, there are a few tools we can recommend for specific purposes.?Crowdfunding campaigns?or?preparing a landing page?and sharing that on social media, online forums, reddit, etc. or via small scale paid advertisement, are both valid options, especially for consumer products and business ideas.

For B2B products and internal processes, it often makes sense to use?paper/interactive prototypes,?or techniques like the?Wizard of Oz, directly with the target audience instead.

Focus on building a toolkit?or a collection that comes with instructions and that empowers people to pick the ones that work for their specific needs.?

Best practices

Before we wrap up, let’s do a quick recap and cover the key best practices when it comes to refining and developing your raw ideas into tangible plans and concepts.

• Make sure to understand, communicate, and clearly?articulate the difference between a raw and a refined idea?– this is key to getting the results you want.
• First, do a quick?sanity check. Could this have the potential to be worth the effort? Don’t be overly critical at this point.
• Try to?understand the real why behind the idea?– great ideas often look horrible at first, until you really take a closer look. There are two common reasons:
• The?proposed solution?might honestly be?terrible, but the problem or opportunity super important!
• Truly novel ideas can sound?weird or completely unrealistic at first. Just look at the story of Airbnb, SpaceX, Tesla, or many of the other big breakthrough innovations we all know of.
• Take it step by step, don’t try to create a perfect, completely flawless idea with a detailed plan right away
• …instead, get to?the real world as quickly as possible to validate assumptions?that help to truly refine the idea
• …and remember that it’s an?iterative process.?You usually need at least a few iterations to make any non-trivial idea into a great one.
• Remember, a?refined idea is always actionable, and should have very clear next steps.
• As a leader,?set?constraints?and guide the big picture. This helps spur creativity and adds focus, both of which are crucial for refining ideas, while still allowing your employees the room to actually innovate.
• As a leader,?don’t be too detailed and don’t think you have all the answers. You?likely don’t, as that’s the whole point of refining ideas to begin with. And even if you did have all the answers, the innovators in your team likely won’t be happy to work with a micromanaging boss as they’re usually problem solvers by heart and really hate to work from a specification that doesn’t leave room for creativity.

Conclusion

Refining and developing ideas is a big part of?idea management, and perhaps the most critical step on the way towards building ideas that create real value.

For organizations to really succeed at innovation, they can’t just rely on the heroic efforts of a few individuals but instead need to approach the topic more holistically.

The key to innovation success is to make innovation scalable and repeatable, and the same goes for the process of refining and developing ideas.

To succeed, you need to create processes, guidelines and tools, and then empower people across the organization to use those to develop their ideas and actually drive innovation.

Written by Jesse Nieminen and originally published at?https://www.viima.com.