Managing Complex Technology Innovation

Abstract

R&D management practices in engineering organizations typically conceptualize complex product innovation as a Stage-Gate process whereby novel concepts are matured through successions of development stages and progressively winnowed down at each sequential gate. This view assumes that maturity is a monotonically increasing function of the technology, and that the active process of winnowing is administrative decisions. This paper tests those assumptions using detailed evidence from six longitudinal case studies of technology innovation at NASA.