How should innovation projects be managed?

In a context of intensive innovation, the design of new products constitutes a major performance guarantee for the company. Project management plays a central role in this process because project mode remains the most efficient way of organising innovation processes.

However, it is important to recognise the limits of traditional project management approaches, which are not well suited to innovative projects. Indeed, the criteria of compliance with strict deadlines and predefined budgets, as well as the idea of starting from clearly pre-established goals, do not really fit with the characteristics of innovative projects.

The dominant approach, the Stage-Gate model

In the late 1980s, Robert G. Cooper and Scott Edgett created the “Stage-Gate” model, which takes the innovation process from idea generation to product launch by breaking it down into five main stages:

Assessing the idea and its feasibility
Building the business case
Working on product development and design, as well as the production and launch plan
Conducting laboratory tests and validation processes, as well as market research
Launching, and producing the product under strict quality assurance

Each stage is validated by a gate that allows the project status to be checked in terms of costs, deadlines, current and future risks, quality control and team involvement. The strengths of this model lie in the structuring of projects and the elimination of errors at each stage.

Some limitations

This approach, which is widely used in companies, does not, however, allow the exploratory nature of innovation projects to be taken into account. This exploratory aspect makes them complex to manage since, for some projects, neither the goals nor the way to achieve them are clearly established. “In an innovation project, one does not manage convergence towards an objective defined ex ante” (C. Midler, 2008). In an innovation project, the objectives to be achieved, whether in terms of the product or the knowledge to be acquired, become clearer as the project progresses in the absence of an explicit demand from customers and therefore in the absence of a clearly identified market.

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