The Stage-Gate® System for Product Innovation in B2B Firms
The majority of product developers have adopted a gating or stage-and-gate idea-to-launch process to screen and manage their new product projects. Increasingly, however, leading firms are reinventing their innovation processes: they are building in new methods for generating and screening ideas, streamlining their processes, creating “gates with teeth”, and making their processes leaner, more adaptable and more flexible to suit today’s rapid pace of technological change. This chapter presents a quick overview of the basic stage-gate system, and then identifies some of the new best practices and key success drivers that result in higher productivity in new product development. The result is the next generation idea-to-launch innovation process.