The question
Radiva asked me: after gathering a bunch of solutions from the team, I want to know how to choose the solution that can make it to the prototype section.
My two cents
There are obviously dozen of ways to make this decision. The one that I use the most often works like that:
Understanding the ideas
Pitching: people explain their idea (pitch)
or silent exhibition: we just put all the ideas on a wall (by putting together similar ideas) and people watch what's one the wall without speaking. You then ask if there are questions to understand the ideas (this cuts a lot of time, as people usually understand well a written idea)
Selection through dot voting: each person gets for example 3 dots to vote for the best idea (the criteria can be: favorite one, most profitable, etc.).
Sorting: Sort the different ideas in a top 5 or 10.
Final decision:
either done on the spot (the top 3 gets selected)
or done by the decision maker: the decision maker gets to save an idea out of the top 10 and has to select three ideas in total
or done by a smaller team who selects the 3 ideas to prototype from that top 10
I've done the complex ratings with multiple criterias and scales, but I feel that those processes often over complexify the decision making, create more chaos and people end up being more critical of the results than with a simple dot voting (strange but that's my experience).