Innovation Pipeline Stakeholder Survey Designer

Example output

Stakeholder survey design — Cobalt Foods innovation pipeline (7 concepts, 15 stakeholders, 3 slots)

Purpose and framing note
This survey gathers stakeholder perspective to feed your formal scoring exercise next month — it is not itself the prioritization decision. Frame it that way to respondents explicitly: "your input here shapes the criteria and flags disagreement before scoring, it does not replace scoring." This matters because stakeholders who think their survey answer is the final word tend to either sandbag (protecting their pet concept) or rubber-stamp (deferring to whoever seems most senior) — neither gives you a useful read.

Criteria to ask stakeholders to weigh in on
Given your stated focus (strategic fit and feasibility) plus the reality that four functions have different vantage points, ask each group to rate what they're actually positioned to judge, not everything:
- All groups: strategic fit — "How well does this concept fit where Cobalt is trying to go?" (1-5 scale)
- R&D specifically: technical feasibility — "How confident are you this can be built as described, on a realistic timeline?" (1-5 scale, plus a required comment if below 3)
- Sales leadership specifically: sell-in confidence — "How confident are you that our retail partners would range this?" (1-5 scale)
- Marketing specifically: positioning clarity — "How clear and differentiated is this concept's story versus what's already on shelf?" (1-5 scale)
- Finance specifically: margin comfort — "How comfortable are you with this concept's likely margin profile, based on what's known today?" (1-5 scale)
- All groups: a forced-rank question — "If only 3 of these 7 could launch, which 3 would you choose?" This is the single most valuable question in the survey, because it forces a real trade-off instead of everyone rating every concept a comfortable 4.

Surfacing disagreement, not hiding it
Do not average scores across functions and present a single blended number per concept — that erases exactly the disagreement you need to see. Report each function's scores separately per concept, and specifically flag any concept where one function scores it a 4-5 and another scores it a 1-2. That gap is more informative than any individual score, because it tells you exactly where the scoring-exercise conversation needs to happen before a decision gets made.

Screener and fielding logic
Not every stakeholder needs to answer every question — R&D shouldn't be asked to rate sell-in confidence they have no visibility into, and sales shouldn't rate technical feasibility. Route the function-specific questions only to the relevant group; keep strategic fit and the forced-rank question open to all 15.

Response summarization plan
1. Report strategic fit and the forced-rank results across all 15 respondents, called out by function.
2. Report each function-specific measure only among the group that answered it.
3. Build a simple disagreement flag: any concept with a cross-function score spread of 2+ points goes into a "discuss before scoring" list.
4. Do not compute a single composite "stakeholder score" per concept — that belongs to your formal scoring exercise next month, not this input-gathering survey.

Timeline note
With 15 respondents and 7 concepts, budget for the survey to take each respondent 10-15 minutes; field it at least a week before your scoring session so there's time to review the disagreement flags and decide if any concept needs a clarifying conversation first.

Want me to draft the actual question-by-question survey, ready to paste into a survey tool?