Stage-gate process
The stage-gate process manages innovation as a series of phases separated by decision gates that screen projects before further investment.
Innovation is mostly failure, so the practical question is how to fail cheaply and early. The stage-gate process is one disciplined answer.
The stage-gate process manages innovation as a series of stages, each followed by a gate at which a project is reviewed and either funded to continue, sent back, or killed. Ideas progress from concept through development to launch only by passing each gate, where evidence is weighed and a go or kill decision made.
Failing cheaply
The point of the gates is to spend money in proportion to confidence. Early stages are cheap and exploratory; later stages, with their heavy development and launch costs, are reached only by projects that have cleared the doubts of earlier gates. Done well, this kills weak projects while they are still cheap to kill and concentrates resources on the survivors. The aim is not to avoid failure but to make it early and inexpensive.
The discipline of the gate
A gate is only useful if it can actually say no. The common failure of the system is gates that wave everything through, either because killing a project is politically awkward or because no one applies real criteria. A pipeline that never rejects anything is not a stage-gate process; it is a queue. The willingness to kill projects with sunk investment, on the evidence rather than on attachment, is what gives the method its value.
Where it fits and where it does not
Stage-gate suits incremental and sustaining innovation well, where requirements can be specified and progress assessed against them. It fits radical or highly uncertain innovation less comfortably, because rigid gates and upfront business cases can strangle exploration that needs room to wander. Many firms now blend stage-gate discipline with more iterative, experimental approaches for their most uncertain work.
Used thoughtfully, stage-gate imposes useful discipline on a process that otherwise tends toward either reckless commitment or endless drift. Used rigidly, it becomes bureaucracy that lets through the safe and the political while filtering out the genuinely new.