Welcome back, everybody. In this session, we're going to cover screen-in and screen-out criteria. These are criteria that when used against your idea of a venture or a solution will either help you figure out increasing levels of attractiveness or increasing levels of concern based on issues that detract from the idea. And if any of these criteria are sufficiently concerning, they might push you to choose this particular idea in one direction versus the other or to choose one idea from another. And it works quite simply as follows. As you think about your venture, and you think about the beneficiaries that you have in mind, what you need to be thinking about is the relatively scarce resources, funding, or time that you have available, and most of us are able to spend time – limited amounts of it – in a choice of many places. So what you want to be doing is thinking quite carefully about pruning out bad ideas or less attractive ideas versus the better ideas so that you get the greatest impact for your time and your resources. So these pruning ideas help you to figure out early on higher-probability-of-success projects versus those that perhaps have a lower probability of success. And what we do is we think quite carefully about institutional disqualifiers or criteria that would cause us to immediately disqualify or screen out an idea. So for example, in our program and of course you should come up with the criteria that are relevant to you and your context, in our context any activity that is going to generate dependency rather than self-sufficiency for beneficiaries, we will not undertake. So we want to be very, very sure that if we're going to commit time and resources to a project, it must result in self-sufficiency for beneficiaries. A second concern for us is where there are environments with high levels of corruption that we cannot work around or within, we will pass and move on to another area. A third example would be if there is sophisticated equipment that needs to be deployed in the field, and it's not durable or user-friendly or requires very high levels of maintenance in skills or logistics, poor environments, we tend to shy away from projects that have that characteristic. And another one might be, for example, in the feeds business in the far north of Zambia. If the project requires very high levels of qualification and we're not certain that that level of employee or colleague or partner exists there, then we might push away that project and move on to another, just because we're concerned about being able to actually deliver on the ground. Screen-in criteria are criteria that enhance the attractiveness of a project. So for example, if we take a list of things as per the table in chapter one of the book, and you can by the way use this to compare one solution to another,for example, the number of people that will benefit. If you compare one solution with another or one project with another, the greater the number of beneficiaries, the more attractive that project. If the beneficiary is likely to suffer to some extent – and suffering could be nonphysical, it could be financial; it could be a time loss; it could be discomfort – then we would tend to steer away from more projects that score higher on that dimension. Long-term social impact, very, very important for our program. The longer the social impact duration, the more attractive that project for us. The degree of key stakeholder receptiveness to the project is very important to us. So, once we've identified the key stakeholders, the more attractive the project to them, the more likely they are to want to support it, the more inclined we will be then to try and choose that project over other alternatives. Very importantly, receptiveness to beneficiaries of the solution. And we will get into this a little bit later in the course, but not all solutions are adopted rapidly by beneficiaries, and there's a whole host of reasons for that, which we'll get into in another session. The degree of entrepreneurial experience by the team that's going to deploy the solution is also very important. Is there someone on the team or has this group of entrepreneurs done this before? We like that experience, particularly where it's been successful. And then we'll talk about this a little bit later – Mac will cover it in concept testing – is this ease of testing on a small scale. Can we test our concept relatively quickly, relatively cheaply, or at low cost? And if so, we're more inclined to want to consider that project because we can get earlier validation versus perhaps another project. Now what you can do is score one project versus another on those dimensions as per the book, chapter one. You'll see one to five, and you can tally up those attractiveness levels. And the project with the higher score is typically one that would be more attractive than the other alternatives; and if you're going to choose one, that might be the place to start. However, if there is a disqualify in play – and again, you would need to think very carefully about this – that project would immediately be disqualified unless you can figure out a way to work around that. So this is a very quick and dirty way of getting to relative levels of attractiveness of one project versus another or one solution versus another. And we find it not only useful for choosing between projects, but it sparks creativity in solution design. It sparks creativity in implementation design. And these questions, particularly when discussed with stakeholders, will often invoke the kind of constructive critique or constructive design in the early stages of your project that are beneficial to you, regardless. So the process is relatively easy to do. What it does require is that you give the disqualifiers and the screen-in criteria some thought and then you use them consistently across your projects. And if you do this, what we have found is it's another tool that's easy to use that will help you choose where to spend your relatively limited resources to best effect.
