Bringing Agile Innovation into the Stage Gate Process – Innovation Excellence

Everyone is talking about how to speed up their innovation process. Or, at least make it more efficient. It is the current hot topic, especially amongst the multinational Goliaths.

And with good reason…

Starts-ups and digital business models are proving over and over again that they are winning at the innovation game. And this is all through their adoption of the agile innovation philosophy. That is, to learn fast and iteratively, experiment, and implement continual improvements.

But how does a large manufacturer adopt some of these more effective ways of innovating? When you make millions of something, the drive is for production efficiency. The system is not designed to make nimble changes daily, or even monthly. It is a completely different type of animal.

It Is Not Really About Speed, It Is About Efficiency

We all know the benefits of getting a product to market early and fast; it will face less competition and initially earn higher margins.

But, getting products to market faster doesn’t work if you are creating the wrong products in the first place. Move too fast and you could be forfeiting quality for speed and rushing to market with a less than optimal solution, that fails in the first year.

Applying the agile philosophy is as much about quality, efficiency, and the elimination of wastage as it is about speed.

The Stage Gate Process Is Not At Fault

Product producing businesses tend to operate their innovation process utilising the stage gate principles. We say principles as that is what they should be. The stage gate process (sometimes referred to as the waterfall process) was designed to help business make informed decisions, prioritise projects, allocate resources and know when to terminate projects. And this is still needed.

However, the stage gate innovation process in many businesses has grown into a bit of a beast. It is the procedures and protocols that have built up around the decision-making gates that have resulted in wastefulness, inefficiency, and strangely, lack of control.

General Principles Of Agile Innovation Process Efficiency

Here are some of the key principles of the agile innovation methodology that can and should be used to update the typical stage gate process: –

In Summary

There is no need to ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’. The stage gate process is not fundamentally broken. Instead, it can be modernised and made far more efficient and effective by applying the key principles of agile innovation methodology.

It will mean reallocating resources and spending more time and money prior to concept testing. However, this does save an awful lot of wastage and stop poor decision making throughout the rest of process.

Ultimately, it delivers the key innovation goal of a substantially higher innovation success rate, more efficiently.

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Shelly Greenway is a front-end innovation strategist and partner at The Strategy Distillery – a brand innovation consultancy that specialises in opportunity hunting and proposition development. Their success rates are driven by their proprietary consumer co-creation IP. Follow @ChiefDistiller