Exploring holistic intuitive idea screening in the light of formal criteria

•This paper empirically examines idea screening in the context of wireless.•A link between holistic intuitive and criteria based assessment is established.•Gut feeling assessment is explained by 50 percent by three weighted criteria.•Two innovation indexes are constructed one for radical and one for incremental ideas.

The aim of the article is to achieve a better understanding of idea screening selection based on intuition in relation to formal specific criteria.Four experienced experts used two approaches to independently evaluate a set of 83 ideas. The first approach was “gut feeling”, whereby the experts rated each idea on the basis of their intuition. In the second approach the same ideas were rated instead using three established specific criteria (Originality, User Value, and Producibility). Regression analysis showed that the three criteria explained about 50 percent of the intuitive assessments. Furthermore, one of the experts thought out loud during his intuitive assessment, thus revealing further influencing.This article contributes by establishing a statistical relationship between assessment based on intuition and assessment based on formal specific criteria. The article also offers two additional candidate criteria, and five tentative affectors, that could provide a further explanation of intuitive assessment.. The conclusion reached in the study is that intuition can be used because it is less resource-dependent than criteria-based assessment; however, there must also be some emphasis on validating the assessor’s domain of expertise, and designing the instructions, if the assessment is to have an incremental or radical twist.