Lecture slides : Stage gate, portfolios, agile systems

Lecture slides
Stage gate, portfolios, agile systems

When teaching Innovation, lectures about the Stage-Gate process always bugged me. The approach is pretty limited in its application because it works for corporations but is too cumbersome for smaller companies. Stage-gate also has a number of assumptions that are problematic like the idea that we need to generate a lot of ideas and progressively eliminate. What I learned from working on Agile development is that a single incomplete idea may be enough if we continue developing it. In a recent lecture, I managed to reach a way of presenting Stage-Gate to Master students in Innovation Management in a way that is both more theoretically grounded and more practical:

• More theoretically grounded: I embed the topic within a broader context of theory for decision-making under extreme uncertainty (Loch, 2014) which paradoxically allowed a more practical discussion of approaches for settings like SMEs where Stage-Gate models are too cumbersome.
• More Practical: I introduce the notion of project portfolios and especially management of project lineages (Midler, 2013) was a useful extension to counter the criticisms of Stage-Gate. Traditional stage-gate has little to add on learning by-doing or on transferring learning from precious projects. Failed projects may be a foundation for future success!

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