What is Idea Generation and Screening in the New Product Process?
Every new product a company launches started as one idea among many others that never made it to market. Idea generation and screening are the first two working stages of the new product development process, the point where a company goes looking for possible new products, then narrows a long list down to the few worth actually investing in.
Get this stage wrong, and everything downstream suffers. A company that skips proper screening might spend months developing a product that was never going to fit its brand or its market. A company that generates too few ideas in the first place might end up developing the only idea it had, rather than the best one.
Where Does This Fit in the New Product Process?
One of the most widely referenced models of the new product process was developed by the consulting firm Booz, Allen and Hamilton, first published in 1968 and updated in 1982. It lays out seven stages: new product strategy development, idea generation, screening and evaluation, business analysis, development, testing, and commercialization. Idea generation and screening sit right at the front of that process, after the company has set its overall new product strategy (what kinds of markets and products it’s even willing to consider) but before any real money gets spent on developing a specific product.
Idea Generation
Idea generation is the deliberate search for new product possibilities. The goal at this stage isn’t to find the perfect idea, it’s to generate a wide pool of options so the company has real choices to work with later. A company that only ever considers one or two ideas at a time is really just hoping it guessed right, rather than genuinely comparing alternatives.
Where Do New Product Ideas Come From?
Companies typically draw on several sources at once, rather than relying on just one:
- Internal R&D and product teams, who may be exploring new technology or formulations regardless of a specific market need yet
- Customers, through complaints, support tickets, reviews, and direct feedback, which often reveal unmet needs the company hadn’t considered
- Employees, especially sales and customer-facing staff, who hear directly what customers are asking for
- Competitors, whose products and moves can highlight gaps in the market or ideas worth adapting
- Distributors and retailers, who see demand patterns across many brands and can flag emerging trends
- Formal brainstorming and idea-generation techniques, run internally to deliberately produce a larger volume of ideas than would come up naturally
The point of casting a wide net is that a lot of these ideas won’t go anywhere, and that’s expected. Idea generation works best when the company temporarily suspends judgment and just collects options, rather than screening ideas as they come in.
Screening and Evaluation
Once there’s a reasonable pool of ideas, the company needs to cut it down. Screening is the process of evaluating each idea against a set of criteria to decide which ones deserve further investment, in the form of the more expensive business analysis and development stages that follow. This is where judgment finally comes in, after idea generation has deliberately avoided it.
What Do Companies Screen For?
Screening criteria vary by company, but they typically include:
- Strategic fit: does this idea match the company’s stated new product strategy and overall brand?
- Market potential: is there a large enough group of customers who would actually want this, and is the market growing or shrinking?
- Technical feasibility: can the company actually build or produce this with the technology, skills, and resources available?
- Competitive position: does the company have a genuine advantage here, or would it be entering a market competitors already dominate?
- Profitability potential: even at a rough, early estimate, does this look like it could generate a reasonable return?
Screening usually happens in rounds rather than one single pass. An initial screen might just eliminate ideas that obviously don’t fit the company’s strategy at all, a much cheaper filter than a full financial analysis. Ideas that clear the first round then face closer scrutiny before moving on to business analysis, where the company builds out more detailed financial projections.
A Practical Example: A Coffee Shop Chain Considering New Products
Let’s say we’re the product development team for a regional coffee shop chain. Our new product strategy, set at the company level, says we’re focused on beverage and light food innovations that fit our existing café format, not standalone retail products or anything requiring major kitchen investment.
During idea generation, we might collect ideas from several sources at once: baristas reporting that customers keep asking for oat milk-based seasonal drinks, a competitor’s successful launch of a cold brew concentrate for retail sale, and an internal R&D session exploring a new cold-extraction brewing method. That gives us a pool of, say, fifteen distinct product ideas.
In screening, the retail cold brew concentrate idea might get eliminated early, not because it’s a bad idea in general, but because it doesn’t fit our strategic focus on the in-café format. The seasonal oat milk drink survives the strategic fit filter easily, since it’s exactly the kind of beverage innovation we’re looking for, and it also has strong evidence of market potential from direct customer requests.
The new cold-extraction method might pass strategic fit and technical feasibility, but raise a flag on cost, since the equipment required is expensive relative to the size of the opportunity, so it goes forward for a closer look in business analysis rather than being immediately approved or rejected.
Notice that screening isn’t just a yes or no filter. It’s also about routing ideas to the right level of further scrutiny, killing off poor fits early and cheaply, while sending promising but uncertain ideas on for more detailed financial evaluation.
Why Does This Matter to Brand Managers?
For a product manager, getting idea generation and screening right is one of the most cost-effective things a company can do in the entire new product process. Killing a bad idea during screening costs very little. Killing the same bad idea after months of development and a failed product launch costs a great deal more, in money, time, and often in the team’s morale and the company’s credibility with retailers or customers.
This also has implications beyond the product team. Employees across the business, not just R&D and marketing, are often a genuine source of good product ideas, particularly customer-facing staff. A company that has no formal way to capture and route those ideas into the process is likely losing good opportunities before they’re ever considered. Building a simple, known channel for employees and customers to submit ideas, and being clear about how those ideas get screened, tends to pay off over time.
Advantages and Limitations
The clear advantage of a disciplined idea generation and screening process is that it reduces the risk of expensive failure later. By filtering out poor fits early, the company concentrates its more expensive development resources on ideas with a genuinely better chance of success.
The limitation is that screening criteria are still judgment calls made on incomplete information. An idea can look weak on paper during an early screen and still turn out to have real potential, and the reverse is also true, an idea that clears every screening criterion can still fail once it reaches the market. Screening reduces risk, it doesn’t eliminate it. There’s also a cultural risk worth watching for: if a company’s screening process is too conservative or too tied to existing products, it can systematically filter out genuinely novel ideas that don’t fit neatly into existing categories, even when those ideas might represent real opportunities.
Bringing It Together
Idea generation and screening are really two halves of the same job: first widen the pool of options as much as possible, then narrow it down using clear, consistent criteria before real money gets committed. Companies that do both well tend to develop fewer products overall, but a higher proportion of the ones they do develop succeed. That’s a much better trade than developing more products with a lower hit rate.
