Investment Roulette
Investment Roulette is a participatory activity where participants present proposals that are assigned to randomly selected categories using a roulette wheel. This approach fosters creativity, strategic adaptation, and collective decision-making to prioritize resources or actions. It is ideal for situations where the evaluation process needs to be more dynamic and new perspectives encouraged.
Preparation
- Define the purpose:
- Clarify the objective of the activity: allocating resources, prioritizing ideas, or categorizing proposals based on their relevance and impact.
- Decide which categories will be included in the roulette, such as thematic areas, evaluation criteria, or priority groups.
- Design the roulette wheel:
- Prepare a physical roulette wheel (made of cardboard, wood, or plastic) or use a digital tool like Wheel of Names.
- Assign categories to each segment of the roulette wheel.
- Prepare the proposals:
- Ask participants in advance to prepare their proposals or ideas.
- Each proposal should include a brief description, objectives, and potential impact.
- Necessary materials:
- Physical roulette wheel or digital tool.
- Cards or tokens with the proposals.
- Boards or large sheets of paper to record results.
Step-by-step instructions
- Introduce the purpose
- Explain to participants the objective of the activity and how the roulette will help explore new ways to allocate resources or evaluate proposals.
- Present the roulette categories and how they relate to the group’s priorities.
- Presentation of proposals
- Each participant or team presents their proposal to the group.
- Allow a limited time for each presentation (e.g., 3-5 minutes).
- Spin the roulette wheel
- Take turns spinning the roulette for each presented proposal.
- The selected category will determine the perspective from which the proposal will be evaluated or prioritized.
- Examples of categories:
- Social impact.
- Technical feasibility.
- Innovation.
- Profitability.
- Scalability.
- Evaluate proposals by category
- The group discusses how the proposal aligns with the assigned category.
- Use guiding questions:
- How does this proposal meet the category criteria?
- What strengths and areas for improvement does it have under this perspective?
- Record observations on a board or document.
- Resource allocation or prioritization
- Based on the discussions, allocate symbolic resources (e.g., tokens, points) to the most relevant proposals within each category.
- You may allow a group discussion to adjust allocations if necessary.
- Closing and reflection
- Summarize the results and discuss how the assigned categories influenced the group’s decisions.
- Reflect on the key takeaways and the next steps.
Example categories for the roulette
- Social impact.
- Technological innovation.
- Scalability.
- Cost-benefit analysis.
- Technical feasibility.
- Urgency.
- Environmental sustainability.
- Social inclusion.
- Collaboration potential.
- Implementation time.
