Bidirectional idea development

Traditional stage-gate development models have been designed as linear, forward-only frameworks.

You meet the requirements to progress, you move on, you lock the gates behind you and throw away the key.

Unfortunately, such model doesn’t work so well for innovative ideas.

Whatever model you have, or decide to implement, be it funnels, pipelines, stage-gates, it is paramount that it supports regression.

In other words, it should be possible to lower the maturity level of innovation projects and teams, scale back the investment (including team size) in order to revisit the requirements of the preceding maturity level.

Doing so allows you to keep exploring without burning money due to sunk cost fallacy.

Read more about Managing Innovation at Scale here.