Hundred Dollar Test

TL;DR

Participants assign an imaginary $100 between ideas. Those ideas with the most money are selected to move on to your next stage of development.

What you'll need

  • Whiteboard/flipchart
  • Pens
  • Some way of counting groups of $100 per person. (I’ve had fun using 9 large chocolate coins, and 10 small ones)

The Hundred Dollar Test is a way of selecting ideas to carry forward to the next stage of development. It’s used when you have already generated a number of ideas through exercises such as affinity mapping. It’s outputs are similar to the NUF test and dot voting.

Groups of participants are given $100 to place next to ideas they think are worth pursuing. You can ask participants to write the amounts on a flipchart or whiteboard, but if you can, use something physical, ideally coins that can represent certain values. (I’d suggest using cents or pennies as your base).

On a flipchart or whiteboard, ask participants to note reasoning for each amount allocated across the list of features.

After going through each groups choices, make a master chart and combine the totals of the groups to see which ideas came out on top across the participants. Discuss within the group which ideas are the most valuable, and interesting enough to explore further.

If you have difficulty defining your top ideas, do another round with another $100, but only allow participants to assign values of $25, $50 and $75 to the ideas


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