Abstract
The early phase of innovation can be thought of as a tournament of ideas. In this talk I provide a conceptual model for idea tournaments and then present data from a half dozen tournaments in which a web-based software tool we developed (the "Darwinator") was used to capture and evaluate new venture and new product opportunities. Using these data we can answer some basic questions about idea tournaments. How many ideas is enough? How aggressively should ideas be filtered? How should individuals be organized to maximize their performance identifying opportunities.