Moving Beyond Stage-Gate Project Management

Traditional approaches don’t lead to breakthrough innovations.

October 24, 2023

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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.

In 2000, BMW made a decision to explore using rapid manufacturing technologies for mass manufacturing of cars. The idea, in part, was that these technologies could open up scope for developing altogether new ways of making cars (in much smaller series) that could offer more customer choice and variety. But beyond a sense that the technologies represented a potentially huge opportunity: No one at BMW understood what executing on its vision would involve, which meant that they could not apply any of the established project management approaches.

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Christoph Loch is a professor at and the former director (dean) of the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School. He is also a visiting professor at PHBS Business School, Shenzhen, China

Haijian Si is the former CEO of Chinese new energy companies Linuo Power Group Co., Huanyu Power, and Hanergy Thin Film Power and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School.