How do you set the order for ideas?

As far as I know, this isn’t a customizable setting of the Idea Pipeline widget you’re using. It appears that it defaults to ordering ideas ideas with the most votes at the top. 

I’d recommend checking with support to see if there are any workarounds you could do with a third-party script or something like that. 

If you need an alternative solution, you could replace your current approach with 3 separate Recommendations widgets. These widgets are manually curated, so you’d lose the easy automated moderation of just updating the idea status to move it from one column to the other. 

I recommend adding this as an enhancement idea for the Idea Pipeline widget, as I think others would have similar use cases.