Moving Beyond Stage-Gate Project Management

This article describes how German automaker BMW and European airline Air France have developed new approaches to managing large projects aimed at creating fundamentally new products or ideas that profoundly alter human behaviors. Traditional approaches, such as the stage-gate process, while effective at incremental improvements, don’t work as well when it comes to breakthrough innovations or attempts to change established behaviors. Some of these new approaches harken back to the Manhattan and Polaris projects, with their reliance on iteration and experimentation, while others rely heavily on the principles of fair process.