The idea Potential Score is SilkFlo’s initial take on a new idea, a quick, early signal of how strong it looks before anyone on your review team has even opened it. It’s not a final verdict. It’s a prioritisation tool, helping you and your reviewers spot the ideas worth fast-tracking versus the ones that need more thought before they’re worth the team’s time.
Where It Comes From #
The Potential Score is calculated from the Spark questions, the short set of quick questions you answer right at submission. Because the Spark questions are tailored to the Value Driver you picked (Cost Reduction, Revenue Growth, Productivity, Customer Experience, Risk & Compliance, or Employee Experience), the exact questions behind your score differ by idea. See Submitting an Innovation Idea for the full breakdown of which questions apply to which driver.
One thing worth knowing: the Spark only appears in the employee flow, whether you’re submitting through the guided Modal or the Opportunity Finder. If an idea is submitted straight through the Full Assessment, there’s no Spark step, so no Potential Score is calculated for it. That’s expected. Full Assessment ideas already carry enough upfront detail that this early filter isn’t needed.
Two Component Scores #
Every Spark question feeds into one of two component scores:
- Potential Impact measures how significant the opportunity is: its scale, urgency, and how many people or how much value it touches.
- Clarity & Feasibility measures how well-defined and achievable the idea is: how confident you are in the outcome, and how complex the path to get there looks.
Which specific questions map to which score depends on the Value Driver, but every driver’s Spark is built the same way: a mix of Potential Impact questions and Clarity & Feasibility questions, each worth a set number of points.
How It’s Calculated #
Each Spark question carries a point value depending on the answer you give. Your score is the share of points you earned out of the maximum possible:
- Potential Impact Score: add up your points across all Spark questions mapped to Potential Impact, divide by the maximum possible points for those same questions, and multiply by 100.
- Clarity & Feasibility Score: the same calculation, using only the questions mapped to an idea’s Clarity & Feasibility.
- Potential Score (Overall): your total points across every Spark question, divided by the maximum possible total, multiplied by 100.
Worth noting: the overall idea Potential Score isn’t a simple average of the two component scores above it. It’s calculated from your total points across all Spark questions combined, so a driver with more Clarity & Feasibility questions than Potential Impact questions (or vice versa) will naturally weight the overall score toward whichever category has more points on offer.
Reading Your Score #
All three scores run from 0 to 100%. Higher is stronger. A few patterns worth knowing:
- High Impact, high Clarity & Feasibility: your strongest candidates. Worth fast-tracking to a full assessment.
- High Impact, low Clarity & Feasibility: a compelling idea that’s still underdefined. Often worth prioritising for assessment specifically to sharpen the case, rather than deprioritising outright.
- Low Impact, high Clarity & Feasibility: a quick, easy win, just not necessarily a big one.
- Low across both: likely low priority for now, though still worth keeping visible in case circumstances change.
You’ll see your Potential Score on your idea’s card as soon as you submit, giving you immediate feedback before it’s even reached a reviewer.
