The corporate world always asks its employees to think out of the box, become innovative, and grow towards an innovative mindset. The moment an idea comes to the launch of the product, innovation is the most-demanded thing; however, as the business starts growing, it starts building waterfall processes that slowly prohibit the path of innovation and make it impossible. Now, what is innovation? Innovation is becoming obsessed with your customers, understanding their incomplete needs and requirements, and then taking steps towards the solution of those needs.
Most of the time, corporations fail to build an innovative culture, and even after funding large amounts in a project, they get no results. The real cause behind the failure of a new innovative idea is designing the solutions in a silo, i.e., without bringing in the test-and-learn approach. Generally, organizations spend huge funds on large projects and incentivize their employees without learning, testing, and pivoting the process.
One of the most widely used methods to regulate and handle innovation is the Stage-Gate process, which is foundational to corporate innovation and an operational roadmap for getting on the right paths from product ideation to product launch. A stage-gate process is a complete product development lifecycle where it implements strategic meetings allowing organizations to go or no go decision-based market data, learnings, and experimentations. These stage-gate project investments explore the problem area, test with customers, define the product’s market fit and hence decide the products further along the product development lifecycle required to scale the product.
Focus Areas To Get the Success With Stage-Gate
When you work with the stage-gate innovation meeting, a cross-functional board of decision-makers comes up with the three specific decisions: Pivot, Preserve, Parish. Here are a few major focus areas for the success of your business:
Strategize Like A Venture Capitalist
As a member of the stage-gate committee, you must always think and act like a venture capitalist, willing to take risks and invest in a project’s potential and focus less on the historical data and performance. Get promising training and coaching to think like a capitalist venture and prepare yourself to have organizational alignment within the meeting. The stage-growth committees meeting table is not for the organizational meeting.
Each Stage-Growth Meetings Should Come Out With Outcomes
More than twice, the stage-growth meeting is organized just to complete the checklist and doesn’t have an impact or decision out of the meeting. Thus, make every stage-growth meeting mandatory for all committees and get the decision derived directly from the one-particular meeting without pushing it to further dates.
A Detailed Process Is Not Always Better
The stage-growth process is designed to be simple, making both the committee members and the project teams excited about taking part in the project. Following a funnel process where each gate of the funnel should have a standard set of questions to be asked by the committee members, and the participants should be given the right tools/frameworks to answer those questions.
Avoid Vanity Metrics
The key to success is the right metrics to measure and present to the stage-growth committee. Therefore, choosing the appropriate metrics to track customer behavior change is of utmost importance. The vanity metrics are inefficient in measuring the behavior and could not tell you the best approach for a project.
Invest In The Outcome Of A Project Completion & Make Your Stage-Gate Brand
Before investing your fund in the big product launch, look at the actual reason you want to bring the product to the market and achieve it from the project. Thus, get the five investment criteria to validate the venture:
- Problem Validation
- Solution Validation
- Business Model Validation
- Strategic Fit
- Team
Moreover, you should keep the practice on with what you preach, synchronize your thoughts with your end-user and make the stage-gate process enjoyable. Building a brand, creating interactive platforms, and organizing virtual meet-ups will help you build a community of innovators.
Conclusion
The above steps will serve as a source of inspiration when you evaluate innovation agencies. Apart from these, there are various numbers of factors that play a great role in finding the right innovation partner to work with. If you want to get the best coaching for your business and speaking engagement, then reach us, Catherine Agada.
Refrences
Pirenne, V.I.N.C.E.N.T. 2021. Re-thinking-stage-gate-innovation. 8th June. Re-thinking stage-gate innovation. [Online]. [21 February 2022]. Available from: https://www.boardofinnovation.com/blog/re-thinking-stage-gate-innovation/