At this phase of the journey you should now have, quite literally, dozens of ideas. The key to the Ideate phase was divergent thinking: expanding your options, getting outside the box of ‘usual thinking,' challenging the way things have always been and the ways that you have been taught to think about them, suspending judgement, exploring widely.
Now it is time to balance all that with some convergent thinking: selecting the most promising options, thinking more concretely about how you might adapt new ideas to your current circumstances, applying judgement, doing something in the here and now, making something happen.
It is important to acknowledge this shift in emphasis. A common pitfall for potential innovators is to go around talking with wild-eyed enthusiasm about all the great ideas they have, only to meet cynicism from colleagues who say things like "Be practical" or "That will never work." Perhaps this has even happened to you?
And so, this next phase of the thinking differently journey is just as important–and requires just as much deliberate effort–as the other phases.
Experience across many industries suggests that the process of convergent thinking that is required to get one new idea implemented (such as a new product, service or internal procedure) begins with around 100 ideas that have come out of idea-generation sessions and proceeds through a process that some have termed "The Innovation Funnel." This is a process of harvesting or selecting ideas, further developing and testing them, in order to find the one or two that are truly and successfully innovative. In this process, most of the brainstormed ideas get discarded. Discarded ideas are not a failure of the process of innovation; they are part of the process of innovation.
While you or the small group of people that you have involved in generating the ideas can certainly select a few to take forward, consider that harvesting is also a good time to get more people involved in the process. It can be done by a relatively large group of 12 to 20 people or more; including organizational leaders, people who were involved in generating some of the ideas, and several people whose opinions are representative of key stakeholder groups.
By involving others, you are creating buy-in and increasing the commitment to at least test out a few of the ideas. Remember, there will be many people who will be uncomfortable with these ideas simply because they were generated by thinking differently–they do not correspond to the pre-existing mental valleys of how things ought to be done in healthcare.
You will need many voices in support of at least trying some ideas, so begin recruiting those voices now.
You might want to go back to review some of the advice in the Engage phase of the journey.