Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil · October 2026
We frequently encourage people to be creative.
We brainstorm. We invite new ideas. We tell people to think outside the box. Organisations invest considerable time and resources in creating environments intended to stimulate innovation.
But generating an idea is only the beginning.
Sooner or later somebody has to decide:
And behind that apparently simple question lie several others:
These questions matter because evaluation is not a neutral stage between creativity and innovation. Evaluation determines which ideas receive attention, resources and opportunities for development — and which disappear.
The innovation process is often represented as a sequence:
Yet the thinking required at different stages is not necessarily the same.
During idea generation, we generally encourage divergent thinking. We want possibilities, experimentation, imagination and openness. Premature criticism can inhibit creativity.
During evaluation, the emphasis changes. We become more selective. Questions of feasibility, value, resources, ethics, strategic fit, sustainability and potential impact become important.
This transition from creating possibilities to judging possibilities deserves much more attention.
An organisation may be excellent at encouraging people to generate ideas and still have an evaluation system that systematically filters out unfamiliar, disruptive or unconventional thinking.
The problem may therefore lie not with creativity itself, but with the system through which creativity is evaluated.
In my original article, I drew upon Bradac’s (2018) review of 29 methods and techniques used in idea evaluation.
These ranged from relatively familiar approaches such as SWOT analysis, cost-benefit analysis, decision trees, prioritisation and anonymous voting to more specialised approaches including the Delphi technique, Kano model, TRIZ, the Kepner-Tregoe matrix and the Vroom-Yetton-Jago Decision Model.
The existence of so many methods presents an interesting problem.
Before evaluators decide which idea to select, somebody must first decide how those ideas will be evaluated.
Bradac conceptualised the process as seven stages:
This means that judgement begins before we formally evaluate the creative idea.
We first evaluate how we are going to evaluate.
And that decision can profoundly affect what subsequently appears to be the “best” idea.
Consider something as ordinary as choosing a restaurant.
We may evaluate possibilities according to affordability, location, accessibility, quality, atmosphere or previous experience.
Change the criteria and we may change the decision.
Creative ideas are no different.
An idea considered too expensive under one evaluation system might appear highly valuable when long-term social benefits are included.
An idea considered impractical today might become feasible when technology changes.
An idea that appears inappropriate in one cultural or organisational context might flourish in another.
Evaluation therefore cannot be separated from context.
This is where Systems Thinking becomes particularly valuable.
Systems Thinking encourages us to move beyond examining isolated components and instead consider relationships, contexts, patterns, feedback and consequences.
An idea does not exist independently of the system into which it is introduced.
Its value may depend upon relationships between people, organisational culture, technology, resources, language, power, timing and numerous other factors.
Rather than asking only:
Systems Thinking encourages us to ask:
That is a much richer question.
Evaluation also depends upon whose interests we consider.
Businesses commonly evaluate innovations in relation to stakeholders such as customers, employees, managers, owners, suppliers and competitors.
But the boundaries can be drawn much more widely.
What about local communities?
The natural environment?
People living elsewhere in the world?
People who have little organisational or political power?
Future generations?
An innovation may appear highly successful when judged according to short-term financial return while producing substantial social or environmental costs elsewhere in the system.
Systems Thinking therefore invites us to extend the boundaries of evaluation.
The question becomes not simply:
but:
There is another dimension that deserves particular attention: power.
Ideas do not enter organisations on equal terms.
The organisational status of the person presenting an idea can influence how seriously that idea is considered.
In hierarchical systems, ideas may need to travel through several levels of authority before reaching somebody with the power to allocate resources.
This raises uncomfortable questions.
Would precisely the same idea receive the same evaluation if it were presented by:
a senior executive rather than a junior employee?
an acknowledged expert rather than a novice?
a confident speaker rather than somebody who struggles to articulate their thinking?
a person speaking their first language rather than their second or third?
someone at the centre of an influential network rather than somebody positioned at its margins?
When we evaluate an idea, we may believe that we are evaluating its intrinsic quality while simultaneously responding to the status, language, identity, confidence or credibility we attribute to the person presenting it.
The evaluation of creativity is therefore also a question of inclusion.
Language presents another challenge.
A potentially valuable idea may be communicated imperfectly.
The person presenting it may not possess the language, confidence or rhetorical skill necessary to persuade the evaluators.
This creates the possibility that we reject not the underlying idea, but the way the idea has been communicated.
Systems Thinking suggests the importance of feedback loops.
Instead of simply rejecting an idea because it has not initially been expressed convincingly, evaluators can ask questions, clarify meaning, encourage reformulation and allow ideas to be presented through different forms.
That distinction is crucial.
Perhaps one of the most important questions from my original article concerns rejection.
Evaluation systems are usually designed to identify winners.
Ideas are compared, prioritised and selected. Those judged unsuitable are discarded.
But rejection may tell us only that:
That is very different from saying:
An idea rejected today might become valuable tomorrow.
An idea rejected in one organisation may thrive somewhere else.
Two individually rejected ideas might produce something innovative when combined.
A seemingly unrealistic idea might become possible following technological or social change.
Instead of treating rejection as the end of an idea’s life, we could therefore ask:
This turns evaluation from a simple filtering mechanism into a learning process.
Feedback is particularly important because evaluation affects not only the idea being judged but also the person who generated it.
A dismissive response can discourage somebody from presenting their next idea.
Constructive curiosity can do the opposite.
In my original article I used the metaphor of a thermostat.
Feedback can turn the temperature of creativity up or down.
A cold response may inhibit the energy required to continue developing an unfamiliar idea. A receptive response can create conditions in which the idea is questioned, refined and strengthened.
Evaluation therefore has consequences beyond the immediate decision.
It influences the future creative capacity of the system itself.
Formal evaluation techniques can give us the impression that decision-making is objective.
But human beings remain part of the process.
Intuition, previous experience, emotion, assumptions and unconscious influences can affect judgement.
Sometimes we describe this as “gut instinct”.
Sometimes we need to “sleep on” an idea.
Sometimes a possibility looks different after reflection.
This raises another question that I first considered in the original article and which I believe remains worthy of further exploration:
Deadlines, anxiety, organisational politics and pressure may influence judgement just as surely as formal evaluation criteria.
Perhaps evaluators, like idea generators, need opportunities for reflection, incubation and contemplation.
The central argument of this updated article is therefore simple.
We should not only evaluate creative ideas.
We can ask:
Who designed the process?
Who selected the criteria?
Whose voices are represented?
What assumptions underpin our judgement?
What relationships and patterns are we overlooking?
What are the wider consequences?
What feedback do rejected ideas receive?
Could the idea have value somewhere else or at another time?
And what might we discover if we changed our own perspective?
These questions move evaluation beyond the search for a supposedly objective mechanism for separating “good” ideas from “bad” ones.
They invite us instead to recognise evaluation as a complex human, organisational and systemic process.
This article is an updated and substantially revised version of an article I wrote several years ago, How do we know when a creative idea is worth developing and implementing in the process of innovation?
Returning to it has made me realise that the question at its heart has become even more important to me. We devote considerable attention to encouraging creativity and generating ideas, yet perhaps too little attention to the people, assumptions, criteria, contexts and systems through which those ideas are judged.
My thinking has also evolved. I am now less interested in simply asking “How do we evaluate creative ideas?” and increasingly interested in asking “How do we evaluate the systems through which we evaluate them?”
This leads me to a question that extends far beyond creativity and innovation:
How many potentially transformative ideas have been lost — not because they lacked value, but because the systems evaluating them were unable to recognise their value?
The same question can be asked in education, research, recruitment, leadership and organisational life. Whenever we decide which ideas, people or forms of knowledge deserve attention, investment or recognition, we also need to examine the assumptions, power relationships and ways of thinking embedded within those decisions.
Perhaps genuine creativity therefore requires more than becoming better at generating new ideas. It may also require us to become better at recognising possibilities that our existing ways of thinking have taught us not to see.
Dr Jesvir Kaur Mahil (5 October 2026)
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