Idea Validation Tools

Jack Brophy, Co-Founder Anytime Creativity

Steve Blank, entrepreneur, best-selling author and educator at Stanford University and Imperial College, says that “an idea without validation is simply a gamble, nothing more.”

Idea validation saves time, minimises risk, aligns with market needs, refines solutions, builds confidence, and supports scalability by ensuring an idea solves real problems before making significant investment. In our experience, it is the most overlooked, undervalued stage in the problem-solving process.

Too often, students and professionals alike fall into the trap of confirmation bias—seeking out research that supports their initial assumptions rather than rigorously testing and refining their ideas. Instead of iterating based on real-world feedback, they focus on proving themselves right, increasing the risk of pursuing solutions that fail to address genuine needs.

How Our Idea Validation Tools Work

We have integrated 4 distinct stages to our idea validation process:

1. Inspyro is our trained, customised GenAI Idea Assistant. Learners tell us that it is a really effective way to get quick, cheap and cheerful feedback on an idea. And we are collaborating with The Garage at Microsoft to integrate new AI developments (like agents) that are being rapidly rolled out. Our AI mission is to deepen the student’s appreciation of how GenAI can most effectively support them in a problem-solving setting. At the same time we believe that this learning can ignite a lifelong journey of GenAI for good.

   

2. PeerPoint is our smart peer student feedback system. Individuals are assigned a team and asked to build, combine and improve on that idea. This tests a different creative mindset than original thinking AND crucially enables all teams to receive a number of peer student suggestions to analyse.

3. ExpertEcho is our educators & external subject specialists feedback loop. We have recruited a panel of volunteer subject matter industry experts. They are ready to support educators by engaging with student teams on their ideas, inspiring them to produce better outcomes. Our dream is that this will help to excite, motivate and nurture a new, passionate generation of problem-solvers that can help the World tackle some of the biggest challenges confronting us.

4. Finally we have a built-in rapid prototyping tool in the form of an image generator that is pre-populated to generate a rapid prototype version of a team’s idea. Teams can prompt further to iterate on the image. Teams can upload an image that they have created from scratch if they prefer.