inKNOWvations: January 2011

5 Steps to More Effective Gate Meetings

Michel Delifer

Featured inKNOWvations guest writer Michel Delifer, Regional Sales Director with Sopheon, shares five practical and easy steps to ensure efficient and effective Gate meetings.

Cross-functional, high-investment new product development (NPD) decision-making can be challenging. Data required for informed decisions are often late in coming or difficult to understand, leaving project proponents and executive stakeholders feeling ill-prepared. In the absence of good information, team members and others commonly try to influence support with loud voices and little fact.

In the business world, innovation comes in two flavors: vanilla and revolutionary. Most innovations are plain vanilla, the kind that take a company’s current way of doing business and make it a bit better.

As vice president of FedEx Innovation, Mark Hamm specializes in what he calls “game-changing innovation” -- inventions that defy accepted rules and rebel against restrictions on what’s possible. The trick is to know which flavor is right for your business.

Every CEO wants its company to create and sell game-changing products, products that are out of this world. It is hard. But is it possible at all?

I worked with a large number of companies in the United States that are leaders in their sectors including Coca-Cola, Kohler, Pitney Bowes, Motorola, 3M, Mattel, Mercedes-Benz and Fisher Price. My job was to gather the latest innovations from around the world and feed the R&D departments of large companies with my findings. Some of these companies pay consultants fortunes to help them bring an innovative culture to their organization. If the consultants are successful and ideas start fertilizing then they will have to take on the risk of losing millions of dollars and their reputation with a product that may or may not be a success. Innovation is risk taking and the bigger the company, the bigger the stakes are.