The Napkin Index / Free / 10 minutes
How mature is your concept decision-making, really?
A free, 20-question self-assessment for innovation leaders in consumer and industrial products. It scores your organization across five dimensions: how honest your idea generation actually is, whether your decision criteria are clear before you get emotionally attached to a concept, how early technical and regulatory realism enters the room, how much real market validation happens versus assumption, and whether anyone actually has the courage to kill a bad concept once money’s been spent on it.
Your overall score and maturity stage appear the moment you finish. Enter your email and you’ll also get the full breakdown: a score per dimension, your weakest dimension called out, and a short report you can genuinely bring into your next steering committee meeting.
What it measures
Five dimensions.
01 / Volume & Honesty
Do the bad ideas even make it to the table?
02 / Criteria Discipline
Do you know when an idea should die, before you’re emotionally invested in it?
03 / Technical & Regulatory Realism
Do you know it can be built and approved before you fall for it?
04 / Market & User Validation
Have you talked to anyone who’ll actually use it?
05 / Decision Courage
Does anyone actually dare to kill a project?
Four maturity stages.
Napkin Stage
Ideas live and die on gut feel and hierarchy. The good news: everything from here is upside.
Sketch Stage
There’s a process on paper. It gets skipped when it’s inconvenient, which is exactly when it matters.
Prototype Stage
Solid discipline with specific gaps. Your dimension breakdown shows exactly where.
Production-Ready
Production-Ready. Decisions run on evidence and criteria, not gut feel or hierarchy. Not much room left to improve, just to maintain it.
03 / Start Now
20 questions. 10 minutes. Straight answer.
No slides, no pitch, no gate on your headline score. The full breakdown is one email away.
Two ways the report can end.
Napkin stage, prototype stage, or “we need to be in production in nine months.” We’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right team for it.
Book a readout
Want to walk through your result? Book a free 20-minute readout. No slides, no pitch.
A different, deeper test
Shown only when your overall score lands in Napkin Stage, or when both Criteria Discipline and Decision Courage score in the bottom third: your lowest scores aren’t about one concept. They’re about how your organization decides, full stop, and that’s a deeper question than this test answers.
Kasper Friis’ Decision Debt Diagnostic measures exactly that: the compounding cost of decisions your organization defers, avoids, or makes by default.
Napkin Engineering Group
Brønsholmdalsvej 119
2980 Kokkedal
Denmark
hello@napkineng.com
+45 31 4000 90