Morning. Every project your business has ever started is still technically alive. That's the problem.
Innovation.
Stage-Gate
Of everything your business has started in the last two years, how many were formally stopped at a meeting where stopping was one of the options on the table — and how many just thinned out until nobody could say when they'd ended? The difference between those two numbers is money you no longer have.
Robert G. Cooper, a professor at McMaster University's DeGroote School of Business in Ontario, spent years studying hundreds of new-product launches to find what separated the successes from the failures, and in 1990 published the result in Business Horizons as Stage-Gate. The structure is deliberately dull. Work is divided into stages — scoping, business case, development, testing, launch — and between every pair sits a gate: a meeting with named attendees, a fixed set of deliverables due beforehand, criteria agreed in advance, and an output that is more than a verdict. Cooper split those criteria in two. Must-meet criteria form a checklist that removes misfits quickly. Should-meet criteria are scored, so projects can be ranked against one another instead of each being judged alone. And a gate has four available verdicts rather than two: go, kill, hold, recycle. The trap is the gate that has only ever said go. Cooper has returned to that failure for decades since — his own name for the remedy is gates with teeth — because a gate where nothing has ever been stopped isn't a decision any more. It's a milestone with catering, and the pipeline behind it fills up with work everybody privately knows is finished.
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