Visualize the "Quality" of Ideas! Harness 500 Expert Ideas for Business Development

"We launched a new business division, but we've been stuck in ideation for six months."
"We're preparing for a service launch in a year, but we can't decide what to do."
Have you ever hit a wall when trying to concretize a business or service?

Launched in April 2020, the "Expert Idea 500" solution aims to support new business planning. It's a service we highly recommend to those facing such challenges. With the cooperation and technical support of Mimir and VISITS Technologies, it gathers over 500 ideas from more than 100 experts within a month, aiming to accelerate the review process.

We spoke with Masahiko Sakamaki of Dentsu Inc. Business Design Square (BDS) about the development background and operational steps.

Thoroughly rethink "what to do" and reassess the power of ideas

Hello, I'm Masahiko Sakamaki from BDS. What do you think is the biggest bottleneck when companies consider new ventures? I believe it's a lack of ideas. We developed "Expert Idea 500" to break through the situation where a shortage of ideas prevents new initiatives.

In my daily work, I often received consultations from clients saying, "Our new business isn't progressing well." Listening to these stories, I frequently thought, "They haven't exhausted all possible ideas. They need to consider more directions."

For instance, while they might select a business domain like healthcare or automotive, they struggle to decide "what to do" within it. Even after repeated ideation sessions internally, they fail to find a "this is it!" idea, or they find consultant-proposed ideas unsatisfying. I've even heard of new business divisions created only to report, "We've been ideating for six months straight."

The reason we can't decide "what to do" is because new ventures are uncharted territory for the company. In existing business areas, ideas naturally emerge based on experience-driven intuition and gut feelings, and we can judge whether those ideas are good or bad. However, the truer a new venture is to being genuinely new, the fewer people within the company possess expertise in that field. When everyone is essentially an amateur, good ideas can't be generated or selected.

So, to make selection easier even for novices, we should have numerous experts well-versed in that field brainstorm ideas. This allows for a comprehensive view of "the types of ideas that exist in this field" and "the possibilities it holds." Furthermore, by having these experts rank the ideas, we can visualize which are good and which are bad. This is the service concept behind "Expert Idea 500."

Considering "Why do this business?" based on a company's vision and mission is crucial. However, I also believe the concrete "What to do?" business idea is equally vital. Yet, I feel the current focus is too heavily on "Why?" while "What?" is being overlooked.

I wondered if there was a way to contribute to both generating business ideas with infinite potential and making the decision on "what to do" from among them. With the help of Mimir and VISITS Technologies, we realized a completely new approach to idea generation and decision-making: "Expert Idea 500."

Five steps to gather 500 ideas from experts and find the optimal solution

Now, let me introduce the specific details of the service.

The steps are as follows:
Step 1: Select Experts and Build a Portfolio
Step 2: Design the questions to pose to the experts
Step 3: Ideate and have experts evaluate each other's ideas
Step 4: Categorize and score the emerging proposals
Step 5: Select 1-3 ideas from the narrowed-down categories and refine them

Step 1
Selecting experts is a crucial step that defines the scope of your ideas. You must choose experts capable of covering all relevant areas for your ideas. For example, when aiming to materialize a healthcare IoT business, you would select individuals from companies developing healthcare devices, as well as researchers in healthcare at medical or engineering universities. Additionally, include experts in related fields like sports tech to enhance comprehensiveness. Through repeated discussions with the client, we create an expert portfolio (the optimal combination ratio) and use this to select experts from Mimir's expert database.

Step 2
Next, we design the questions. This is a crucial step for enhancing the quality of ideas. To maximize the experts' insights, we avoid simple requests like "Please think of a new IoT health device." Instead, we frame questions based on the ideal state for the challenge or the customer's behavioral context, such as "What do you think people's health should be like?" Since ideation is conducted online, we carefully design the questions to avoid misunderstandings.

Step 3
Using the VISITS Technologies system, we conduct online ideation over a period of approximately two weeks. Following this, experts spend about one week evaluating each other's ideas.

Experts are ideal for generating ideas and equally ideal for evaluating them. Having knowledgeable individuals evaluate ideas generated by other knowledgeable individuals allows for appropriate prioritization among a large volume of ideas.

The aggregation of idea evaluations utilizes VISIT Technologies' proprietary CI technology (patented). This technology does not simply aggregate votes; it assigns greater weight to votes from individuals who generated many evaluated ideas, preventing it from becoming a simple vote count, and scores ideas accordingly.

Step 4
The resulting large volume of ideas is then categorized to make the overall picture and direction easier to grasp. Using natural language processing and cluster analysis, ideas are grouped into large, medium, and small categories based on similarity.

Since each idea has a score assigned in Step 3, you can calculate the average score within each category. You can narrow down the scope by referring to the average scores and number of ideas per category.

Depending on the client, they might decide to "go for the mainstream path that everyone thinks should be pursued and has high scores," or they might judge that "we don't have the resources for a large-scale business, so we want to pursue a niche business with fewer ideas but high evaluations." This ability to "quantitatively evaluate ideas" is the greatest feature of "Expert Idea 500."

Step 5
In the final step, using the scores from Step 4 as a reference, you select categories to refine. You integrate several ideas within the classified categories and refine the business proposal while considering the client's assets (resources). You polish it into a feasible and optimal plan.

Highly effective for large corporations with complex structures where decision-making is difficult

Companies that benefit most from this service are those overly optimized for existing operations, where rigid organizational structures hinder flexible decision-making.

Historically, decision-making on ideas often relied on the loudest voices declaring something "good," leading to vague approvals. Using "Expert Idea 500" ensures ideas generated comprehensively by the right people are appropriately ranked. This provides a clear overview, enabling relative comparisons and allowing logical explanations of "what to pursue." Since both categories and ideas carry scores, quantitative explanations based on these scores are also possible.

It's useful not only for launching new businesses but also when significant transformation is needed for existing ones. As one example, Kao's Fabric Care Division utilized it to explore the future direction of their business and gave it high praise.
If you're interested, please feel free to contact us.

"Expert Idea 500" Release