Are you opening up the Stage Gates to let the new innovating world in?

The Stage-Gate process has had a significant impact on the development and launch of new products, but its linear, rigid, and prescriptive nature has drawn criticism in today's fast-paced and competitive world of innovation. To address these concerns, Robert G Cooper has reinvented the Stage-Gate process to be more adaptive, flexible, agile, and accelerated. This new process will have four attributes: spiral development cycles, context-based stage and gate definitions and activities, risk-based contingency models, and flexible criteria for 'Go/Kill' decision making. Agile development, sprints, and scrums will be used to deliver working products as functioning prototypes, and lean Six Sigma methods will be adopted to reduce non-value-added work. The focus will also be on accelerating the process and maximizing speed by reducing time-wasting activities, encouraging concurrent activities, and dedicating proper resources to projects. The new Stage-Gate process will start with blank canvases and explore uncertainties and risks to determine the critical assumptions and deliver the right results at the right stage to validate those assumptions.