This thesis investigates decision-making activities leading to the initial selection of which new ideas should be selected for further development or rejected. This process, often referred to as idea screening, is described as being one of the most important, but also challenging, tasks to master during the entire innovation process. There are two main reasons for this: Firstly, not all ideas are good and secondly no firm has the resources to develop every single idea proposed to it. Thus, it is important to be careful when initially deciding which ideas are to be selected and developed into future possible innovations in order to eliminate weak ideas and retain those that have a substantial chance of becoming successful.  Two alternative decision-making approaches are explored in the thesis (the intuitive and rational approaches). In the thesis, the concept of intuition during the screening of product and service ideas is demystified. The empirical findings show that decision-makers utilize five main underlying criteria when intuitively assessing ideas. Of these, the findings indicate user-value to be the most important one, or at least the criterion that most assessors emphasize when making intuitive decisions. The findings presented in the thesis increase our understanding of the use of rational and holistic intuitive decision-making when screening ideas during the Front End Innovation phase, as well as questioning the traditional view of intuition, as a decision-making tool that is only reliable if applied by those with a vast amount of experience and expertise. The reported findings indicate that, for example, users with an understanding of the idea context are able to intuitively identify the ideas that decision-making experts identify as the top (best) ones. Hence, managers faced with a situation where they are being inundated with new ideas can turn to non-experts for help. / This thesis explores and investigates two alternative decision-making approaches (the intuitive and the rational approaches) used when screening ideas during the initial part of the innovation process. In this thesis, the concept of intuition when screening product and service ideas is demystified. The empirical findings show that decision-makers utilize five main underlying criteria when making intuitive assessments of ideas. Of these, the findings indicate that user-value is the most important one, or at least the single criterion that most assessors emphasize when making an intuitive decision. The findings presented in the thesis increase our understanding of the use of rational and holistic intuitive decision-making when screening ideas during the Front End Innovation phase, as well as questioning the traditional view of intuition, as a decision-making tool that is only reliable if applied by those with a vast amount of experience and expertise. The reported findings indicate that, for example, users with an understanding of the idea context are able to intuitively identify the ideas that decision-making experts identify as the top (best) ones. Hence, managers faced with a situation where they are being inundated with new ideas can turn to non-experts for help.

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Background: Entrepreneurship plays an indispensable role in today’s society. Especially, the creation of new ventures promotes economic growth and new opportunities. Hereof, Sweden is viewed as a role-model, since it is one of the most innovative and entrepreneurial active countries in the world. Almost 6% of Sweden’s inhabitants are currently characterized as nascent entrepreneurs and thus, are engaged in early entrepreneurial activities without having started an official venture yet. Considering the fact that nascent entrepreneurs have no prior entrepreneurial experience while facing uncertain environments, they have to evaluate the attractiveness of new venture ideas and decide whether they are worth to pursue or to drop them. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to explore the evaluation approach of nascent entrepreneurs in the light of new venture ideas. More precisely, we want to investigate what kind of approaches they make use of when evaluating the attractiveness of those ideas and their motives behind the approaches. Method: This thesis is of qualitative nature while following an inductive approach and conducting a multiple case study with ten cases of different nascent entrepreneurs. The data is collected through semi-structured interviews, which were conducted in personal face-to-face meetings. For analysing the empirical findings, we engaged in within-case and cross-case analyses, where we identified and analysed common patterns and differences across the cases. Conclusion: All of the research respondents apply a variety of evaluation approaches, where they make use of their cognition as a means of judging and assessing the attractiveness of new venture ideas. Besides utilizing their social network, existing knowledge and future estimations, all nascent entrepreneurs are using heuristic rules-of-thumb for evaluating the idea attractiveness. Thereby, we identified Passion, Monetary Incentives, Resources and Market Potential as the most outstanding rules-of-thumb in the clear majority of the cases.