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Where's the Beef INNOVATION STAGES-GATES

This is the fifth article in the series "Where's the Beef": quick-and-dirty methods to make a go or no-go decision regarding whether or not and how to try to commercialize an invention.

Many TIM-researchers have developed a great number of refinements of what often is called the model for or ”method of innovation (stage) gates”, (web: Click here for example) which refers to the fact that most ”industries” (in the wide sense) go through a series of check-points, when they try to manage their innovation portfolio (checking for technical feasibility, production feasibility, patentability etc), steps which correspond well to Porter’s concepts.

I have included a few generic diagrams in my material showing you the ”life cycle” of an invention. The headlines are technical feasibility/novelty, (which for us would indicate IPR protection strategies), market/competitor analysis, financial analysis and organizational analysis.

Any good school of management will train graduates in this discipline and call it business planning. Done well, such planning exercises will give an excellent perspective on whether or not to take a given opportunity forward.

The problem for the tech transfer professional is that we have a large number of potential projects to manage and that the business planning exercise takes due diligence and time. It is the scope of ”Where’s the beef”-planning to make shortcuts, quick-and-dirty ways to save time and money. Needless to say, such crude methods risk to send us off target, but ”c’est la vie”, the calculated risk of the profession: either you manage a few of your potential winners well or you manage all reasonably well, so you can pick a few you really believe have the beef.

It’s like the man in the cartoon who is looking for his keys in the light of a street lamp at night. Someone asks him if he lost his keys under the lamp, and the man answers:”no, but there’s light here”.

The Stages-Gates method can be seen as a structure of individual processes and check-points, like in a quality management programme, which you should go through. For the tech transfer professional, it's important to rapidly understand the technology and its alternatives, the relevant markets, the value chain, the important companies and key persons in these companies.A search engine like JBEngine found at TII's homepage is really useful to help us throught this process in practice, In a later article I'll give you an overview of the TT professional's "perfect search engine".