Yet there have been consistent criticisms of it, as the world of innovation has moved on. Today it is faster-paced, far more competitive and global and become less predictable.

The cries of the Stage-Gate process as being too linear, too rigid and far too planned, bordering on prescriptive have often been heard. The gates are too structured and the constant ‘creep’ of the controlling bureaucracy surrounding it in paperwork, checklists and justification has simply led to so much non-value-added work added to the moans and groans.

Surprisingly, the Stage-Gate concept was created in the 1980’s and led to Robert G Cooper’s different evolutions of this evolving and absorbing many new practices and experiences gained by different organizations across this time.

I’ve written previously on this blog site about the concerns within this Stage Gate system if organizations allow the ‘controllers’ to dominate over the ‘creators’ of innovation what can happen. We end up with “self-inflicted wounds caused by jumping hurdles and closing gates on innovation”.

The idea-to-launch gating system is under more threat today than ever before.

Is there a potential new generation or are we just going through the motions, like shifting deckchairs on the titanic as it steams towards a submerged iceberg? Bob Cooper has been open enough to challenge his thinking constantly and at this point of time he is reinventing the Stage-Gate again.

The details of the new process and its different multifunctions are still a work-in-progress. What he is looking for is something far more agile, vibrant, dynamic, flexible gating process that has as its outcomes a leaner, faster and more adaptive and risk-based approach. This alone in its principles is a great starting point.

Bob has been writing on this with different papers that have included “What’s Next? After Stage-Gate”, a far more academic one I have been (slowly) working through. It was well worth the read.

So what can we see that is ticking away in the new Stage-Gate thinking?

Will this be enough to reduce the criticisms, will it be adaptive enough to meet today’s needs? I will attempt to shorten down this thinking and try to summarize the main points.

It has three parts to it- it focuses on being 1) Adaptive and flexible, 2) Agile in its deliverables and 3) Accelerated to push the development process.

1. The adaptive and flexible part

Any idea-to-launch system will take its power from being adaptive and flexible and will need to shape itself to the context of each particular project. That is radical enough in any system.

The qualities are going to come from four attributes: spiral development cycles, context-based stage and gate definitions and activities, risk-based contingency models and flexible criteria for any ‘Go/Kill decision making.

For instance the spiral development will be based on ‘build-test-feedback-revised’ iterations. The context-based stage and gate definitions and activities to accommodate multiple versions to deal with full five stage higher-risk projects, lighter versions for moderate risk projects and an express version for small developments. There are different adaptations taking place with users already working through these.

For instance HP has approached this by geographical needs with an emergent model for start-ups, an agile model for growth sectors and a traditional phase-growth review structure for mature markets.

P&G have not employed different processes but focused more on the value-driven process that focuses even harder on the front-end.

The risk-contingency is about constant steps and learning to gather information to reduce uncertainty. Here teams are working far more with blank canvas approaches to identify key unknowns and uncertainties, then determining what information is needed to validate and move in highly flexible and efficient ways. The value of having an experienced team helps here.

Finally in this part the flexible criteria for ‘Go/Kill’ decisions become the change in order of magnitude for me. Financial criteria begin to take a back seat; it is more on strategic criteria as it has always been so difficult to predict the longer-term impact. The move to non-financial criteria will radically alter the dynamics within innovation in my opinion – if this really does take hold.

2. The Agile approach

The stage-gate needs to become far more nimble, speed is the essence.

The growing adoption of the Agile development process applied to software is the point of change.

The use of “sprints” that are “time boxed” and “scrums” for meetings, are designed to deliver working (physical) products as functioning prototypes.

These become “physical milestone objectives” and if these are not achieved then you move into the risk of termination. The emphasis is demonstrating to stakeholders working physical progress. Clearly this becomes more resource intensive but true innovation does require that.

Some organizations are approving projects and resources to have unfettered six-month periods with no rules and no reviews but at the end of this agreed period ‘something’ has to be seen and tested by a customer.

Equally the drive to cut out the “work that adds no value” has involved using Lean Six Sigma methods or similar to take past business case documents from 30 to 90 pages to now 4 pages by Johnson & Johnson. P&G for instance are working on mere six page deliverable packages according to Bob Cooper.

3. Accelerated Process

The focus is on reducing the time wasting activities through a more value-stream analysis, accelerating by overlapping stages, encouraging concurrent activities, ensuring dedicated teams are assigned to properly resource projects, those real concerted efforts to sharpen up the fuzzy front end and automate these through clear support project systems are all being worked upon.

Toyota uses a synchronized process for simultaneous execution and search for ways to improve on this continuously.

The emphasis is to maximize speed, working really hard on scoping the front end in greater detail, and asking key questions on where the right track is and what this needs in resource, time and development.

So there is significant evidence that Stage-Gate is evolving

Some of this is evolutionary, such as fast-track versions, and some more revolutionary, based on more risk-orientated contingency models.

The continued need is to get the next-generation process to be adaptive, flexible, agile and accelerated. The use of the evolving value proposition through prototypes and early beta market testing versions is part of this.

The starting point is with a blank canvases, exploring constantly the uncertainties and risks – determining the critical but evolving assumptions, and working to deliver the right deliverable at the right stage to validate the key assumptions – calls for a completely different mindset.

Is this radical or simply catching up with the changes that we have been seeing taking place in innovation to deal with the pace of change? One that can fit better in our evolving global world that is more impatient than ever, not bothering to wait for those focused on managing the stages and gates in old-world ways.

A time to move on I think for us all?

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Opening up the Stage-Gates to let the new innovating world in? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to think differently about innovation and why it needs complexity and adaptive thinking as part of its design.

Complexity within systems challenge us to think differently, it pushes us to think outside often our normal experiences, to confront and understand and then restructure, often the unordered, into a new order.

Organizations are in need of understanding the complexities within their systems far more.

Complexity within innovation is always adaptive.
The challenge with managing complexity is that it is made up of many shifting and connected parts, that form much around interactions and relationships. These new ‘connections’ are shifting and challenging much of our previous understanding, built often on past practice and entrenched thinking.
We need to think differently to generate fresh insights and new-to-the-world innovation and this begins by us ‘seeing’ the potential by unravelling the complexities involved. To seek a more radical innovation agenda you need to grapple with much within a complex system to yield the ‘promise’ of really new and exciting innovation.

Innovation is made up of many connected parts when it eventually combines and becomes one, the finished article or concept. You gain constantly from its combining power.

Innovation is highly dynamic (or should be), full of interactions and relationships where the individual and the collective whole, changes as a result of the experiences gleaned from engaging within the process. That is a complex adaptive system.

I wrote a piece a couple of years back, as my initial attempt to explain that innovation is a complex adaptive system. There is so much to add to this but recently I was listening to Dave Snowden from Cognitive Edge and this struck me as a great starting point for many.

David is regarded as an authority on the application of complexity theory to organizations, and I think there is so much to learn from following David and his thinking, I’d recommend it.

Understanding complexity – peeling away some of its layers.
David recently gave a part talk on understanding complexity and how to manage it.

He offered these thoughts with my summary of what I heard as my add-ons relating more specifically to innovation.

If innovation is complex, we need to recognize and manage this. They make sense to me in the context of innovation and managing its complexity.

These thoughts from David are in explaining a complex system. They might provide you a better understanding of the complexity often found within innovation and help in your thinking about the implications through.

* Enabling constraints – without constraints you simply have randomness, you decide the level of constraints for the level of flexibility you are looking for (from innovation) and how much you are prepared for uncertainty. You need to strive for a ‘given’ coherence and place this within a structure.

* Complexity is highly sensitive to small changes (weak signals are too easily dismissed) – small things magnify to produce (over time) major impact. What seems trivial actually might be highly significant. Think new technology, it is often dismissed as you lack the skills or understanding so you quickly dismiss it.

Weak signals can provide the possible future directions you need to orientate around. Identifying the weak signals within the frame of the three horizon methodology, can trigger complexity of understanding.

* Granularity matters – if you make something to big and too connected, you can often struggle to adapt and find solutions. Getting the granularity right is key, so we can see the emerging opportunities and this often means we need to break the big ideas down a level or two, to seize perhaps multiple opportunities as well as allocate resources to ‘bite-sized’ pieces of work. It is from these smaller pieces of work you begin to piece the bigger ‘prize’ together.

* You need sufficient but not excessive gradients– the example David uses is the troubles within inequality. If we all had the same equality we provide little incentive for change, alternatively if we have excessive inequality you begin to get preconditions for revolution and potential catastrophic change.

So you need some gradient but not to much. For example everyone aligned with the same values might be a bad thing to do as it destroys variety, or diversity of opinion and conflict and that is unhealthy for innovation. Within any innovation activity some ‘creative’ tension equally can give that gradient.

* Proximity and connectivity can be managed – this is the who and what we interact with, we evolve through our engagements and interactions, these give us our cognitive structure. The key is defining who interacts with whom, not the outcomes. Relationships and networks need encouragement and managing.

* You need to shift from fail-safe design to multiple parallel safe-to-fail experiments – we need to stop trying to work out one (big) thing to get it right, we need to encourage anyone who has a contribution to make, a coherent hypothesis to be allowed to run with it, in parallel for other experiments in a controlled safe-to-fail experiment.

It is the patterns of potential success that evolves from all these experiments evolves and can ‘collectively’ reveal an emerging pattern or concept that ‘breaks the mould’, sees new solutions.

These can be evaluated in parallel to detect something new and value or presented to others so they can evaluate the emerging patterns of discovery to judge and take forward or not. This more discrete project thinking deploys resources better, gives greater agility and adaptability. You set out to stimulate evolutionary possibilities.

* The inherent uncertainty of complex systems means we have to navigate a fitness landscape of possibilities – You are looking for the evolutionary potential from dispositions (the inclination towards something, the attitudes and consequences) and the propensity (the natural tendencies) to give emerging patterns of beliefs, often called peaks and troughs.

Knowing your fitness landscape for innovation is important as I have previously suggest and laid out a possible pathway. You can use landscaping for capturing individual stories or needs to find solutions that are more relevant to those (their) specific needs. Jobs-to-be-done comes to mind here and mapping solutions to closer needs that derive from exploring real stories, through ethnography as an example.

Each of the above has significant innovation implications

If you treat complexity as something you must overcome, reduce it or try to ignore it, you miss significant opportunities within innovation. You can’t force it. To exploit innovation you need to manage it, coax out the possibilities, managing it well, not as simple problems but within a better understanding of a complex system.

It is deciding what complexity within the innovation design and then set about building and placing the right capabilities where they matter.

Avoid the “Business as Usual” Mentality for Innovation.

We cannot enforce ‘business as usual’ as the modus operandi for innovation to make it ‘fit.’ We are faced with the very opposite in today’s world, the need to ‘embrace’ reoccurring change.

We need to manage complexity within the systems and we do need innovation to exploit this to our advantage.

To achieve this we need to obtain as much diversity and non-linear structure in what we do to allow recognition of all the possible options. We need to move well beyond the obvious and move through the complicated, into the complex and once in a while cross over into the chaotic nature of innovation to extract all the innovation ‘juice’ possible.

We need to think differently about innovation and why it needs complexity and adaptive thinking as part of its design.

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End note and further reading: The Cynefin Framework of David Snowden and Cognitive Edge is most valuable to explore. I discussed this from an innovators perspective recently in this post that was describing the value of the Cynefin model towards innovation.

The post Understanding Challenges Within Innovation Complexity first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Firstly a very brief explanation of the Cynefin Model and why I find it highly valuable for innovation management.

Innovation has many characteristics of a complex adaptive system as I have crudely attempted to explain here.

The three primary states within the Cynefin framework are Ordered Systems (including Obvious and Complicated), Complexity and Chaos.

Order is split into two, as this handles a key difference in human knowledge between those states, where the cause and effect relationship is obvious and those where it requires greater analysis or expertise.

Exploring a process of emergent discovery for innovation

Most innovators are working in and certainly are far more familiar with the ordered domains, for ‘obvious’ innovations that extend, enhance or evolve their existing products and services.

Equally, they understand their more specialised place and contribution to be growing in their comfort, in the part they play in the more ‘complicated’ domain, where expertise, dedicated focus and specialization are often required or called upon.

The real challenges come from the really ‘new’ in innovation as it becomes greater in new designs, changing functionality, different technology or significant improvements on the existing that involved greater research and development the more you travel around the cynefin framework.

Here within this ‘ordered’ domain, the innovation activities are a lot more predictable, and more straightforward in their management. This is more about being trained, using expertise where needed, applying skills, making appropriate decisions, having established structures, processes and measurements and then systematically working towards clear objectives.

When you move across into the ‘complex’ or even ‘chaotic’ domains this takes on far more new learning, more situational assessments, looking and combining capabilities to manage emerging patterns and knowledge, applying experiences, looking for diversity of opinions and searching for new wisdom or insights.

Expertise and experience, collaboration and relationships need significantly leveraging. You often diverge/converge constantly as you work through the potential answers. The mindset here is different and it is more one that is based on the detection. Innovation is far more demanding, pushing frontiers, exploring discoveries, dealing in a series of exchanges and recognizing emerging patterns to piece together as real ‘new to the world’ innovation activities.

Let’s describe the domains within the framework

In the obvious domain of order, you assess the facts, categorize them, and then apply established practice. The system is well set up and you work through this in very controlled ways, you tend to adhere to the practices, always looking to improve and apply best practices. You sense- categorize- and respond as your work through the approach. Most of our incremental innovation ‘sits’ here as an extension to what we have established and where most systems, processes, technology understanding and controls are already established, all we are required to do is manage within a defined set of controls (constraints).

The complicated domain is where you tend to need greater expertise, initially, you might have multiple answers to your emerging concepts and you need to work through a better cause and effect so all involved can see the relationships. This is often termed the “known unknowns”. You sense- analyse- respond. This domain requires degrees of expertise and investigating various options and working eventually through the trade off’s. If a decision remains elusive then perhaps you have a more complex issue.

In the complex domain, you need to really work to extract the right answers. This is regarded as the realm of the “unknown, unknowns” and where much of our organizations have to work. Why simply because situations and decisions are far more complex as much is swirling around in unpredictability and flux. You are looking for more for the emerging patterns and you should avoid the attempt to impose a course of action or place ‘increased’ constraints here, you should allow the pathway to reveal itself.

For innovation here, you firstly probe- then sense- and then finally- respond. A solution or breakthrough will emerge and then you can begin to impose growing constraints, looking to move unordered thoughts or patterns into more orderly ones to evolve into final or potential solutions.

Avoid imposing order too early as this can preempt the opportunities for these ‘greater’ patterns to emerge. Leaders need to set the stage, step back, allow patterns to emerge and then determine which ones are more attractive or desirable.

Design thinking works well in this domain, where you visualize, synthesise, create narratives, build on learning stories, and explore multiple prototyping and safe-to-fail experiments.

When you are faced with a chaotic domain, this needs a rapid response. Searching for right answers can waste time, this is the realm of the “unknowables.” Cause and effect are impossible to determine as no manageable patterns seem to exist, only turbulence, challenge and threat.

The need is to quickly act, gain an early sense and respond. It tends to be the domain for top-down decisions, there is limited time for seeking input in ‘normal’ ways. This is the space where you ‘impel’ or ‘impose’ innovation.

Run a crisis team in parallel with an innovation solution solving team. Have one team managing the immediate to manage constantly changing issues incoming and another team working exclusively on exploring doing things differently to move from this chaos back into complexity.

Your innovation solutions have to counter the disruption or move beyond but the toughest part is ‘getting others to let go’. This requires clear leadership and direct communications to attempt to impose immediate actions and re-establish order.

There is a fifth domain, shown in the middle and that is disorder, not knowing which domain you are in and we often struggle to recognize which domain we want to be in for innovation and this disorder stays with us, until we impose order, structures or clarity to the thinking. The Cynefin model is highly contextual for innovation in my opinion.

Finally, to complete the understanding, the Obvious domain is next to Chaos because complacency (the extreme of Obvious) can all too easily produce catastrophic failure.

Thus that boundary is represented by a cliff, or more technically a catastrophic fold. You can find yourself moved from an orderly, steady-state, the business that is obvious to you and then thrown suddenly into chaos, by the sudden change. You fall off the cliff.

Recognizing and applying the different practices to each domain

Another important distinction within the model is around the type of practices each domain seeks out. In the obvious domain best practice rules, you are looking to constantly improve the innovation activity with repeatable, efficient structures and processes. Whereas in the complicated domain it is the search for good practices, the expertise deployed should bring this into the thinking.

On the other hand in the complex domain, you are searching for emergent practices, as you clarify, evaluate, probe and sense.

Finally, in the chaotic domain, this is more the application of novel practice, as you are ‘reacting’ to numerous situations where judgement and experience are applied to find original solutions to tackle mostly unique situations where you are learning as you go.

 You achieve a greater depth in discussions and sense-making around different innovation needs using this framework

Cynefin thus contrasts how things are, with how we know them, with how we perceive them. The overall idea is that the more you allow these three to interact with each other the more likely it is that your actions with be authentic to the situation.

Cynefin goes well beyond a categorisation model that many try to use it for; it is about dynamic movements. So in the model shown above the prime dynamic is shown by the blue arrow.

Sometimes you can move between all four domains and this is shown as the green line (in the above depiction of the framework) and as innovation tends to be more in the complicated and complex space, you ‘operate’ more in these two modes.

So where does the model come from? Dave Snowden from Cognitive Edge. David is regarded as an authority on the application of complexity theory to organisations. David offers so much that is relevant to our work within or for organizations, to listen and learn from.

Innovation is complex and works well within the Cynefin model
I like this as a discussional and resolution solving framework for innovation, as innovation can move across and between complex or complicated at different times, if it is more than ‘obvious’ incremental innovation. It attempts to place orders into the often unordered.

New ideas of innovation emerge in the complex domain and are often dependent on the constraints you impose to ‘extract’ and ‘yield’ choices.

You ‘toggle’ from exploration to exploitation across domains. The more you relax the more constraints can allow new possibilities to emerge. You want to eventually bring the unordered more in control and become more ordered.

From time to time the dynamic within an innovation concept may have ossified in which case a reset is needed; a shallow sudden dive into chaos. You are looking to bring the innovation out of this chaos domain as quickly as possible and impose some order (or constraints).

Only when change is no longer significant is it shifted to Obvious (formerly Simple) as the domain where incremental innovation resides as it relies more on repeatable structures and established practices.

We need to recognize different types of innovation need to be managed differently

I believe truly new (to the world) innovation is in mostly the complex domain and should be treated as such, often we don’t. We need to start with very open minds and then bring the thinking down.

We try to apply our existing practices and experiences best suited to regular or incremental innovation, found in the complicated and obvious domains, where practices constrain the idea more than we often want but sometimes need, as the ‘demands’ are imposed. We start to immediately probe and do not take the necessary time to analyse. We reduce the potential for greater innovation impact in applying constraints.

When you look at the four domains described here think of incremental innovation for working in the obvious, distinctive innovation for the complicated domain, radical or breakthrough for the complex domain and disruptive innovation when it comes to the chaotic domain. Think disorder when you have no established innovation system in place, just expecting innovation to happen!

Each of the above has significant innovation implications

The Cynefin model helps determine the ‘type’ of innovation and its complexity and the constraints you impose upon ‘it’. Recognizing the complexity that can hamper the effectiveness to innovation is very different from our usual management of effectiveness and efficiency.

Innovation requires boundaries but it needs the appropriate thinking, analysis and probing, this framework provides the ‘mechanism’ to promote this.

You need to build flexible systems that adapt, are dynamic and responsive and need that bandwidth for innovation exploration. It is a series of challenges evolving to be exploited, not reduced or eliminated.

Using the Cynefin model allows you to begin to think about the appropriate innovation and what is needed in practice and thinking approach.

It allows you to begin to be prompted in what the possible constraints might be, to allow you or not to explore innovation in these different domains.

To exploit innovation you need to manage it, manage it well, not as simple problems but within a better understanding of being a complex system, to extract the most from the investigation and discoveries.

It is deciding what complexity your innovation might have within the innovative design and then setting about building the right capabilities and framing these appropriately, where they matter.

My endnotes: I have drawn from different material associated with the work and explanations of David Snowden and Cognitive Edge extensively.

My innovation interpretations are built on this growing understanding and by using this model in my innovation discussions, by seeing its value and power for myself and through others. I just hope I have given justice to this fantastic model here.

BTW– The name Cynefin is a Welsh word whose literal translation into English, as explained by David is “as habitat or place fails to do it justice”. It is more properly understood as “the place of our multiple belongings” or “a sense of place” It is pronounced cunevin. The frame’s intent is to explore the relationship between man, experience, and context.
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The post The Use of the Cynefin Model for Innovation Management first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I describe innovation as very much like a tropical rainforest, needing constant fresh attention, similar in its management,

There is my need to cut down certain trees, clear away a lot of the floor covering to allow the sunlight in and permit those ‘selected innovation trees’ to be allowed to grow stronger.

We all have those times where we need to choose, to pursue clearer pathways we believe are better for us. To be more selective in what we do, to be more focused and hopefully achieve a better, lasting result that hopefully offers a more satisfying set of outcomes, to both clients and to ourselves.

Within this comparison I am presently making of innovation being like a forest, I really began to see so much more of a connection in what is happening around innovation that it can be compared to understanding a tropical rainforest. There are many comparisons, let me outline some of these here.

The ecosystem within the rainforest is also needed for innovation to work effectively  

Firstly I would argue that innovation, to be managed well, needs to operate like an ecosystem, the same as a tropical rainforest. Ecosystems to flourish need to experience critical feeds, in the rainforest this is high average temperatures and significant rainfall.

Well, innovation to thrive needs equal attention; it needs a real focus, above average and significant attention to be well maintained.

We argue for diversity within our innovation teams, in our thinking, in our environment and that is no different from the high levels of biodiversity in tropical rainforests. We need this ‘richness’ of thinking, of approaches, of discovery.  We search constantly for ideas, we experiment, and we are subjected to change. We are always looking for that certain something still undiscovered.

Innovation is often under needless threat

I’d argue innovation within organizations is often ‘highly threatened’ due to conflicting pressures and in our rainforests, this is the large-scale fragmentation due to this constant human (failing) intervention and habitat destruction.

We make changes within our organizations to achieve short-term results not reflecting enough on the longer-term consequences. We force out our talented people and can cause a certain ‘extinction’ of the contribution they made to a more balanced vibrancy within the system.

Managing the different strata or layers always needs careful management

Rainforests are divided into different strata or layers with the vegetation organized into a vertical pattern from the canopy top to the soil. Each layer offers a unique biotic community containing different plants and animals adapted for life in that particular stratum. This is so much like our organizations, organised in hierarchies, each dependent but equally each independent to carry on.

We have the forest floor, most of our workforce occupies this position, yet this floor receives only 2% of the sunlight and needs to constantly adapt to survive. I think that does seem like many organizations in their ratio between top and bottom in pay, in understanding direction and contribution.

There is this focus on simply surviving ‘day-to-day’. There is always a certain decay taking place, not helped by the dense strata above. It is a place that is tough to thrive well but it is critical to all the above.

Then we have the understory, the middle managers that are between the canopy and the forest floor. It offers many shade-tolerant shrubs; it is the place that allows vines to climb into the trees to capture light.

To capture their light, this understory often evolves much larger leaves to capture more light (craving for recognition) and allows for the dropping of seedlings to the forest floor. I can relate to that for innovation and our organizations, can you? The understory or middle managers are crucial to the innovation ecosystem.

Then of course we have the rich canopy layer, which forms the roof, it supports the forest as it has the position to attract and support the diversity that is occurring. It determines this, it leads and others simply follow. In amongst this canopy is ‘the emergent layer’, which grows above the average but to meet this they need to be strong to withstand much.

So many of our rising stars get caught out by strong winds that suddenly blow in due to changes of sudden direction or misapplied  ‘habitat’ destruction (wrong decisions) and take a real tumble, unlikely to recover their former position.

All of these layers are reliant on the sun and the moisture within their soil for rainforests to thrive. Innovation equally needs feeding, by the leadership of our organizations engaging with its needs.

Innovation needs new resource minerals, new ideas, new discoveries, and new knowledge flows. If these do not remain fertile, trees are cleared, the soil gets exposed, leached, and it creates run-offs, exposing the erosion that changes the dynamics and vibrancy that innovation can provide.

Then we need to protect the native people of our innovation forest. Those specialized people who understand innovation are our hunter-gatherers that support others to reside and thrive. People, not technology, systems and processes make innovation work. They are the ones to give us the diversity to allow innovation to flourish.

There is always this need to understand our innovation experts, they can teach us much about the environment and what it needs. They can protect and nourish the plants, the birds, and the insects to thrive in a trusting climate; they can balance often conflicting demands.

Rainforests have different soil types, so does innovation

Soil types in rainforests are highly variable and it is the combination of several variables such as climate, vegetation, position, material and soil age that make up the different characteristics we can find. Innovation is no different – we have incremental, radical, breakthrough as well as focus on different types of innovation approach – for service, for business models, from a research-based or technology. Just take a look at the nine different ones I have suggested in the past and described in this collaborative effort some time back.

Rainforests are also reliant on nutrient recycling, so should innovation in our learning, in our evaluation of understanding our success and failures. What inhibited, what released, what accelerated, what aided our innovation efforts? Understanding what allowed us to perform provides for this recycling for sustaining and fueling future innovation efforts.

Then we have always the need for our buttress roots. These are like the buttress roots, my innovation button and threads that create a network for gathering, sharing and translating new knowledge. Today we require and increasingly rely on our networks to give us the sufficient and efficient uptake of innovation nutrients. The more we encourage these buttress roots we avoid erosion and maximize this new innovation nutrient we need within our organizations.

Rainforests can be dense and impenetrable, so can innovation

Understanding all that makes up innovation is like this dense tropical rainforest. When you reflect on the term a jungle or rainforest it has much ambiguity in the application of the term, so tell me doesn’t innovation suffer the same?

Is innovation unruly, it is certainly less advanced than many other functional activities we undertake in organizations. This is slowly changing as we understand it more, all its connected parts. We have allowed innovation to be overgrown with tangled vegetation, often too dense to hinder clear movements or progress?

I have suggested innovation needs to be dynamic; we need to become fit and look fully across the innovation landscape. It is our growing understanding of the richness within the innovation diversity that is both exciting to understand and challenging to navigate.

It is good to sometimes cut down some trees, clear away the undergrowth, allows the potential for greater growth and it does allow the sunlight in.

Sometimes, if you are not careful or selective, you can undermine that broader growth but we do have to increasingly manage within a complex ecosystem to strengthen the whole system.

Often we are needing to make ‘tough’ choices but these can prompt a sudden burst of new energy and then supports new growth activity.

So I’m making my own attempt at managing my own innovation ecosystem as I mentioned within my introduction of seeing “the wood for the trees,” attempting to strengthen certain aspects, methodologies or practices to grow what is more valuable, discarding what might be holding me back.

Let’s see if it allows for an even stronger set of outcomes.

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Squeezing all types of innovation through this, for whatever people claim is a linear process, is simply wrong.

You can simply say: “we destroyed much to get sometimes so little out as the final outcome, when initially it was seen to be so promising.”

The difficulty is that we are still struggling to find a real alternative, although there have been some recent noteworthy attempts, firstly by Jose A Briones and his Spiro-Level 3D approach and then by Paul R Williams, of the American Institute for Innovation Excellence, to move the discussions beyond the Stage-Gate process from this linear into more spiral concepts and beyond.

There has been an awful lot written on Stage-Gate, some people attacking it and suggesting it “guarantees mediocrity for your business”.

Clayton Christensen has suggested “the Stage-gate system is not suited to the task of assessing innovation whose purpose is to build new growth businesses, but most companies continue to follow it simply because they see no alternative”

Stage-Gate has certainly earned its place for product management.
Stage-Gate is an ideas-to-launch process that encompasses a solid body of knowledge built up over the years and has for many become the blueprint for managing the NPD process, reinforcing effectiveness and efficiency as its core discipline. I would argue that’s it! It reinforces but at what cost?

Innovation can actually miss out! Often it can also extract out much of the very process that we need from great innovation to leap forward and grow our businesses today. More on this later.

Employing this Stage-Gate methodology you can feel safe that there is behind it a body of knowledge on the best practice gleaned from studies of thousands of new product developments. The process takes you through stages or hurdles, passing through gates where ‘go/ kill’ decisions should be made.

Organizations that thrive on having a ‘regime’ hold ‘fast’ to the Stage-Gate as their way to manage innovation. This rigidity of a given mindset is one of the real concerns about being totally reliant on the Stage-Gate. It works for product development that is more incremental in nature –the bread and butter of most businesses.

A really short history of the Stage-Gate first.              

Stage-Gate was developed, is registered as a trademark and certainly popularized by Robert Cooper. His first edition was published in 1986 in the early days of understanding the management of the innovation process.

He has since updated with a second edition in 1993 and from this it gained its real traction as the recognized process, and established the term “Stage-Gate” clearly to manage within any product development process. His third edition in 2001 shifted the focus and became more taking the concept further on accelerating idea-to-launch.

In 2011 he gave us a completely revised and updated fourth edition.  Robert Cooper reminds us that his Stage-Gate process has become the most widely used method for managing new products in industry today.

It has been suggested that this Stage-Gate process is a conceptual and operational map. Well, yes for NPD only maybe it is but today with all the other types of innovation needed to be considered by organizations it is NOT really capable of living up to this claim.

I grant you can think through the process conceptually on how to manage this but I feel this grants Stage-Gate more than it really can offer. It is a stage-gate decision process for product development.

Do linear processes manage all the different types of innovation?

Organizations have become so use to thinking only product innovation they are attempting to drive ‘any’ innovation through the same system.

This approach is placing so many self-inflicted wounds on the organization, often in the most painful way possible; through lost opportunities on achieving more significant growth, lost chances to fundamentally change the competitive game and ill-fitting attempts to fit innovation through this one process system.

Original fresh ideas get morphed into completely different end products that seem to become more incremental the further they have to accommodate all the jumping over these hurdles and passing through the stages and gates. It becomes the skill in trying to avoid being ‘killed off’ for often a lack of validation (often obscure)  and that famous cry of “give me proof” often of the unknown- how can you?

Stage-Gate ‘plays’ right into the hands of the bean counter, the risk reducer, the keeper of maximizing productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. Each gate, each hurdle forces the denominator down, mistakenly thinking this is reducing cost risk (often of the only true innovative part) and effective management of time will serve the organization well.

This fuels the short-term protectionism we all cry about today, as well as it adds even more to the long-term detriment of mediocre innovation entering the market. We are still failing to ignite growth and continuing to disappoint customers with underwhelming offerings that still doesn’t meet their needs.

The Stage-Gate is not the panacea for managing innovation

I would argue we should stop regarding the Stage-Gate as the panacea for managing all of your innovation needs. Stage-Gate handles the incremental product cycle fairly well, but when you are on a more open innovation platform collaboration it struggles to be flexible, agile and fit the different challenges presented by the collaborating parties.

True innovation goes through such an iterative process; processes like Stage-Gate are simply not equipped to manage all of what this entails. Nor does it really pick up well on the growing impact any potential new business model innovation might signify.

The stage-gage approach wants to constantly refer back to excepted existing practices and the structures in place and not novel or radically altering ones that can challenge the existing business model. Can you imagine something completely breakthrough or totally disruptive being forced through a Stage-Gate NPD process?

What also does happen when you have to work through separately the potential of the service innovation dimension or the myriad of other types of innovation? Too often we retrofit service instead of running this in parallel.

We have arrived, it seems to me, at a certain point where innovation is often being projected forward to a given solution and then worked back, so it can pass through the Stage-Gate system. Sometimes this is right if you spot a unique opportunity for a job-to-be-done need but we have to be more than careful of this ‘forming’ habit, it can exclude even greater insights and discoveries even here.

Recognizing limitations AND managing in new and different ways.
So we can recognize that Stage-Gate can work well for incremental and well planned out innovation but it ‘stutters’ and can ‘die’ when you need radical, new-to-the-world breakthroughs as you enter those far too many unknowns to try to run them through a system.

Whichever way you ‘wrap’ Stage-Gate it is still a linear process that has to go through justification at each stage and pass through the ‘gate’ in resolving the criteria expected, before it can go on. Irrespective of the innovation this can often load the process with bureaucracy, internal politics and tensions. You increasingly focus on preparing for these ‘gate’ meetings, losing valuable time often not on the idea and concept itself.

Invariably the questions asked to justify and validate requires much rethinking, leading too aspects of the proposal rewritten and then resubmitted, turning even more into growing time delays.

This leads to escalating upwards through the gatekeepers to the senior manager, who is not fully engaged in the process, you lose even more time, he often does not have context, you lose precious opportunity, and you lose money in delays while this all gets sorted out, eventually and it goes on and on with growing conflict and tensions.

There is also a shift to ‘status and attainment’ on sitting on these reviewing committees rather than bringing real ‘value and benefit’ and often this gets confused to the detriment of the process . The process often dominates not the product concept itself. Stage-Gate might have become simply a safety first decision-making tool than an actual NPD process to help and assist.

You begin to justify the many unknowns somehow, you cater to the constant demands for proof at every step of the way, or otherwise you will never get your products out of the door.

We just end up with wicked compromises and the original idea deserves better, much better than that.  If we were honest with ourselves, we shave things off, we dilute, we radically alter what were initially great looking concepts and reduces them down to a pygmy of the original ‘wow’ concept.

Lean and rapid principles have some foundation value

I think where Dr Cooper has continued to explore in his Stage-Gate journey has been the move towards his lean and rapid principles. Those are closer to universal needs of all innovation. These are

1. Have a clear customer focus
2. Ensure as much front-end loaded as you can in assessment and testing
3. Spiral development- find ways to be more iterative and greater community engagement
4. Push for more holistic approaches of effective cross-functional teams
5. Seek the right metrics, accountability allocation and continuous improvement
6. Focus on building a more effective portfolio management through funnelling and appropriate resource allocation
7. Looking to keep pushing for a flexible, adaptable, scalable and efficient process

These are useful ‘generic’ contributions to finding better solutions to having an updated innovation process, irrespective of type (of innovation).

A lot about the Stage-Gate has organizing value to incorporate with this more holistic design of a process to manage all innovation ,it should certainly not be discarded but looked at with a different perspective.

What is called for, in my opinion, is to build even more on these lean and rapid principles but also to recognize and go ‘simply beyond’ the often fixating obsession of applying a product development process with decision gates that many currently have.

Although it is not a bad organizing principle for business decision checkpoints, we ‘just’ need to go way beyond this to obtain the increased need for flexibility required, by considering all the different types of innovation an organization needs to consider and cater for them in some form of reviewing approach, if we can.

We need a different more agile, adaptable process that deals with innovation outside the ‘norm’ of managing incremental NPD, if we are ever going to move beyond the present, more common incremental mindset prevalent today.

The need to build and extend our capabilities and processes

We must certainly stop trying to treat all innovation projects with the same ‘Stage-Gate’ brush, squeezing it through the same process. We need to develop different ‘templates’ but have perhaps a common recognized set of decision points or organizing principles.

We certainly need to offer more autonomy to teams through a more robust Innovation Governance structure, this is for me critically important. We need to shift the mindset from ‘Go / kill’ to greater informing choices and options to consider. We need to be less reliant on data, more ready to sense, listen and make informed decisions as we go.

We must make sure we capture the alignment with senior management on the strategic goals, the priorities and allocating appropriate resources according to the innovation type and challenge.

We need to allow for a greater freedom of thought, of investigating ‘breaking’ ideas, encourage explorations along the way. We need to push for more experimentation, conceptual work, design modelling so as we learn we can quantify, as we quantify we gain increasing identification and organization alignment.

We know much of innovation is unstable, throwing out fluid information that is often contradictory; we need to capture these differences in more flexible, intuitive ways.

This calls for a lot more agility in thinking, in accepting often erratic behaviours to see if we can suddenly leap ahead. Hurdles, keeping to prescribed steps and trying to pass through decision gates needs some very fluid approaches but can still be in disciplined, informed ways but with totally different mindsets of searching for ‘better’ innovation outcomes.

The innovation system required today needs to be more flexible, adaptive, agile and scalable.

The system should not dictate innovation, it has to be more adapted to our different innovation needs and their circumstances so we can maximise innovation’s potential to lead growth.

We need to recognize that a breakthrough concept, a disruptive game changer, a new business model proposition or a multiple type innovation (product, service and BM) need different approaches, all much faster to be developed but with increasing levels of uncertainties being built into the ‘system’ not just taken out because we are uncomfortable with this or unsure how to handle this. Simply ask others to help you, there is no shame in this.

There have been significant changes in our understanding of innovation since Stage-Gate was first introduced. In the process, the culture required, the ways to manage, to align and to develop have all evolved.

We must stop being a slave to the innovation system in place, often left over through legacies in the system and find ways to go beyond the often rigid, linear Stage-Gate process that organizations are locked into.

Innovation is complex and adaptive
Innovation should be understood as a system that will always have non-linear behaviours, it cannot be stage-managed in isolated events.

Innovation is complex and adaptive and the more we recognize the power of unpredictability, the significant variations, need for constant interactions and the careful selection of those ideas that need to be carried forward, the closer we might get to finding a more universally accepted innovation system.

Let’s stop trying to force innovation by jumping hurdles and closing gates that often do not apply, so we end up with self-inflicted wounds because we were on the wrong track.

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