A crucial step in the innovation process is ensuring that your idea is feasible. This can depend on a range of factors, many of which will be specific to your agency and your situation. This can be a difficult assessment to make and there are a number of tools that exist to help guide your decision.

To assist individual public servants in assessing their ideas the Toolkit includes the ‘selecting ideas’ module and the Innovation Development Early Assessment System (IDEAS) for the Public Sector. This methodology is:

• structured using a comprehensive set of standardised assessment criteria
• aimed at early assessment when there is not much tangible data available
• designed to identify ideas with genuine merit that warrant further development and testing.

The IDEAS framework helps to assess, at an early stage, whether or not you want to pursue a project or whether it needs further work to strengthen its merits, or whether it should be abandoned or put aside for now. IDEAS may also be helpful as a framework in presenting your ideas to others.

If you have an idea that you want to assess the feasibility of you can start the IDEAS assessment.

Please note that the IDEAS material is not subject to the Creative Commons licence. The IDEAS material draws on the work of Professor John English.