If you have spent any time in an innovation workshop, you will recognise the moment.
The room has gone well. There are 30, 40, sometimes 50 ideas on the wall. The energy is high. Then comes the part nobody talks about much: figuring out which of those ideas are worth actually developing.
Usually that involves a scoring matrix that weighs strategic fit, feasibility and internal excitement, often supported by some form of consumer testing further down the line. Matrices like these have a real place in the pipeline. We use them ourselves. The useful question is how the consumer voice gets fed into them, and how well it reflects the way consumers actually make decisions.
That is where traditional idea screening tends to fall short.
Why traditional idea screening misses the strongest ideas
Most idea screening measures stated preferences in isolation. Respondents are shown a concept and asked to rate it on purchase intent, appeal, uniqueness. Useful inputs, but limited ones. They do not reflect how real purchase decisions actually get made.
Real choices happen by trade-off. People rarely buy a product because they rated it 7 out of 10 in a survey. They buy it because, when standing in front of the alternatives, it was the one they reached for. That kind of trade-off behaviour is closer to a behavioural lens than a stated one, and it tends to surface different winners.
Most idea screening also relies on a relatively small number of metrics, typically combining two: a measure of purchase intent and one supporting metric. That makes prioritisation cleaner but gives you a narrow read on each concept. The safest idea wins. Not necessarily the strongest one.
There is also a volume problem. Traditional approaches usually have to be limited to a handful of concepts, because asking respondents to rate 50 ideas in a row in a standard survey produces tired, low-quality data. Most teams cannot afford to put 50 raw ideas through proper testing, so the long list gets triaged internally first. Which means consumers never see most of the ideas at all.
That triage is rational. It is also how good, distinctive ideas can quietly disappear before they have been tested against the people who would actually buy them.
A different way to screen
We built Idea Arena to fix that.
Idea Arena is a knockout tournament methodology that tests between 16 and 50 early-stage concepts in a single consumer study. Concepts compete head to head, round by round, until a clear winner emerges. Respondents make a trade-off decision on every match, which is closer to how real purchase choices get made than rating concepts in isolation.
It also means consumers see every concept in the set, not just the eight that survived internal triage. The winners earn their place, and the losers earn theirs.
What we actually measure
Picking a tournament winner is only useful if you also know why something won. So Idea Arena scores every idea on three metrics, and combines them into a single engagement score.
Win rate measures how often a concept beat the competition across rounds. This is the System 2 vote: the considered, comparative judgement that comes from weighing one idea against another.
Response speed is captured to measure most instinctive appeal. It is the System 1 reaction, the gut-level pick that happens before reasoning catches up. Together with win rate, it gives you both deliberate preference and emotional pull on the same idea.
Revival rate flags the dark horses. Concepts that lost early but stuck in respondents’ heads, the ones consumers refused to let go of when given the chance to bring an idea back into the tournament.
The engagement score is where Idea Arena does something most concept testing does not. By combining System 1 and System 2 thinking into a single number, we capture both the immediate emotional response and the considered rational judgement, giving teams a fuller picture of what will actually resonate. Most agencies combine two stated metrics. Idea Arena combines three, and puts them through a behavioural lens you will not find anywhere else.
The output: one scorecard, no debate
Every Idea Arena study lands the same way. You get a visual ranked scorecard with every idea on it. The headline engagement score sits at the top. Win rate, response speed and revival flags are visible at a glance. Every idea is tiered Green, Amber or Red against a threshold agreed at the start of the project, so the prioritisation decision is on the page rather than in the meeting.
For your top ideas, qualitative responses are coded and surfaced next to the numbers. You see what is resonating and where the clearest optimisation opportunities sit, before development starts. None of it is buried in an appendix.
Where the workshop has generated multiple ideas around a similar territory, you also get an idea cluster view. That tells you where consumer appetite is strongest at a strategic level, not just at the level of individual ideas. Useful when you are deciding which platforms to back, not just which concepts.
Where Idea Arena fits
Idea Arena was built as part of how we run end-to-end innovation programmes at FIS Group. It sits between ideation and concept development. The point in the pipeline where, until now, consumer voice has been hardest to bring in.
It also works perfectly well as a standalone study. If you have already generated a long list of ideas in-house and you want a consumer lens on prioritisation before you commit to development, you can drop it in.
Either way, the commercial logic is the same. You make development decisions earlier, with more information, and at a lower total cost than running the same volume of ideas through traditional idea screening.
The honest summary
Traditional idea screening usually forces a choice. You can test a small number of ideas in depth using stated metrics, or you can rate a large number of ideas badly. Idea Arena was built to remove that compromise.
It runs concepts through a behavioural lens rather than a stated one. It combines three metrics into a single engagement score that blends System 1 and System 2 thinking. And it gives you a defensible answer to “why these and not those” before development starts.
If your team is sitting on a long list of promising ideas and the prioritisation conversation is feeling harder than it should, this is the conversation to have.
Speak to the team
Rosie Doyle, Chris Moxon and Emma Wood are leading the Idea Arena rollout at FIS Group. Any of them can walk you through how a study would work for your specific project, what it would cost, and how quickly you could be looking at a scorecard.
Drop one of them a message on LinkedIn, or get in touch.