What Is Idea Screening?
Idea screening is the process of evaluating and ranking ideas to determine which ones have the highest potential for success. It helps businesses filter out weaker ideas early, saving time and resources while ensuring the best opportunities move forward.
When paired with idea refinement, where you benchmark shortlisted concepts against success metrics, you gain the clarity needed to prioritize ideas with real market potential.
Why Is Idea Screening Important?
Innovating is never straightforward. Once you’ve defined your innovation goals and sourced new ideas, the hardest part begins: choosing which ideas to pursue.
Without a clear screening process, businesses risk:
- Spreading resources too thin.
- Advancing ideas that don’t resonate with consumers.
- Missing opportunities hidden in less obvious concepts.
Idea screening solves this by giving you a structured, evidence-based way to select, refine, and prioritize ideas before investing in development.
Step-by-Step Guide to Running an Idea Screening Study
Step 1: Define Your Goals
What do you want to achieve with your study? Clear goals will help shape your survey design. For instance, if you’re looking to launch a new drink flavour, one of your goals would be to see how your promising ideas for new flavours perform against flavours that are already in-market. This goal will help you stay focused, choose the right questions and plan out the length of your study too.
Step 2: Develop Hypotheses
Leverage your industry knowledge, past data, and consumer insights to form assumptions about which ideas will perform best. Hypotheses create a framework for testing and validation.
Step 3: Plan Your Study
Once your goals and hypotheses are defined, the next step is designing a study that can accurately test them. This means planning how your ideas will be presented to consumers and how you’ll measure success.
1. Define your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Your KPIs should connect directly to the goals you set in Step 1. Are you trying to identify the most appealing idea overall? Understand what drives purchase intent? Spot white space in the market? Defining metrics—like uniqueness, relevance, or likelihood to purchase—ensures you can evaluate results in a meaningful way.
2. Decide how to present your ideas.
The way you show your ideas can influence how respondents interpret and evaluate them, so consistency is key. Keep the stimulus format (e.g., all text or all visuals) consistent across ideas to avoid introducing bias.
- Text: Best for messaging, claims, or when you want to avoid branding influence.
- Images: Effective for packaging and product visuals.
- Videos: Ideal for storytelling and engagement. Use selectively, typically in ad testing or communication validation, where storytelling or motion is part of the idea being tested.
Also, avoid switching between or within formats. For example, don’t mix final packaging shots with rough sketches, or long written descriptions with short ones. These inconsistencies can skew results and make it difficult to interpret what’s truly driving appeal.
3. Structure the survey experience.
Keep the flow logical and engaging. Start with high-level reactions (e.g., appeal, interest), then dig deeper into diagnostics (e.g., uniqueness, fit, reasons for liking or disliking). Avoid overly complex questions, and test your survey internally before launch to ensure clarity and a smooth respondent experience.
Step 4: Launch and Collect Results
Target your survey to the right audience with demographic filters and advanced targeting.Once you’ve gotten your results, compare them to your initial hypotheses. Were they proven out or did you discover some surprising insights? Idea screening is a great way to confirm or disprove your assumptions, but oftentimes it also reveals things that you might have never thought of before.
What Is Idea Refinement and Why It Matters
After screening, you’ll likely have a shortlist of promising concepts. Idea refinement is about assessing those ideas against success metrics—your benchmarks for what makes an idea worth pursuing.
Key Questions for Idea Refinement Surveys
- Overall reaction – initial reaction to the product and interest in the idea
- Idea components evaluation – what consumers think about the components and characteristics of the idea
- What do you like about this product/idea?
- What do you think could be improved?
- How would you describe this product/idea? – select all that apply
- What are the benefits of this product/idea?
- Competitors – awareness of other products or brands
- Do you think this product is better than what’s available in the market right now?
- Do you know any other similar competitors’ products? Tell us in your own words.
- Use cases – in which situations consumers would use the product and frequency of use
- What brands within this category have you purchased in the past three months? Write down what comes to mind first.
- Why do you usually use a product like this?
- How often do you purchase products like this one?
- Price evaluation – price sensitivity
- How much would you pay for this product?
- Why did you choose this price range? Tell us in your own words.
- Buying response – likelihood of purchase
How to Benchmark Your Ideas
Benchmarking is a process of comparing the performance of your ideas between each other, in-market competitors, or industry standards. This process allows you to understand which innovative ideas or concepts have real potential for success (based on your business goals).
Generally, benchmarks help you compare ideas based on:
- Strategic fit – Alignment with business goals.
- Market potential – Ability to fill a market gap.
- Consumer need – Extent to which it satisfies unmet demand.
- Purchase intent – Likelihood of buying.
- Uniqueness – Level of originality and differentiation.
- Product recall – Memorability among consumers.
It’s worth noting that in research, the terms ‘benchmarks’ and ‘norms’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing. In market research, norms are industry-specific data points collected over time, helping researchers determine whether their idea meets the standards of ‘good’ in context.
Case Study: How Everipe Used Idea Screening to Validate and Refine Their Innovation Strategy
The challenge
Everipe, a producer of freeze-dried superfood smoothies, struggled to quantify their concept’s potential. Investors wanted hard evidence, and Kerry Roberts (Everipe’s co-foiunder) knew the risk of relying solely on gut instinct. In other words, Everipe needed a structured way to screen ideas, refine their portfolio, and benchmark against competitors before investing heavily in marketing and distribution.
The solution
Everipe partnered with Dig Insights to design an idea screening study on our innovation testing platform Upsiide. Their goal was twofold:
- Screen concepts within their portfolio. Which flavors and product formats had the highest intuitive appeal?
- Benchmark Everipe against competitors. How did consumers perceive Everipe’s packaging, claims, and overall proposition compared to other smoothie brands?
Using Upsiide’s swiping methodology, consumers indicated their level of interest and commitment to each idea. This approach provided both breadth (large, quantitative data sets) and depth (rich feedback on why consumers preferred one idea over another).
The study revealed clear winners in Everipe’s lineup and validated that the brand performed better than key competitors in both likability and purchase intent.
The outcome
Armed with screening and refinement data, Everipe had the confidence to focus their innovation pipeline on the most promising concepts. The research not only guided product development but also gave them a compelling story to share with investors and partner agencies.
It was a pivotal moment for us to hear from a robust sample set – [the data shows that] we have a very powerful idea. So we’re now spending the dollars to bring a team of consultants in, solidifying our brand and products, and scaling production. I mean, talk about actionability out of insight. I’m not sure we would have had the confidence to invest without the clarity that Dig’s study brought us.
Kerry Roberts
Co-founder of Everipe
In short, idea screening helped Everipe transform an exciting concept into a market-ready product with proven consumer demand, paving the way for long-term growth.
Benefits of Idea Screening and Refinement
- Reduces risk by eliminating weak ideas early.
- Saves time and budget by prioritizing only viable concepts.
- Uncovers hidden opportunities that outperform initial assumptions.
- Validates consumer demand before investment.
- Builds confidence in innovation decisions backed by data.
From Idea Screening to Market Success
Idea screening and refinement help you move from a long list of possibilities to a focused set of innovation concepts with real potential. By defining goals, testing assumptions, refining ideas with benchmarks, and comparing against competitors, you can confidently prioritize the innovations most likely to succeed.
The next step? Use your shortlisted ideas as the foundation for product development—exploring pricing, packaging, messaging, and creative execution to bring them to market.
About the Author
This article was written in collaboration with Leigh Greenberg, Customer Enablement Manager at Dig Insights. In her role, Leigh helps brands modernize their market research practice through our innovation research platform Upsiide, bringing expertise in innovation research and concept validation to support smarter product and creative decisions.