Stage-gate

Stage-gate is a project structure of stages separated by gates: decision points where a review decides whether the work continues, stops, waits, or goes back for more evidence.

How it's used in a university-industry collaboration

Cooper's model is the standard in product development, used by 75 to 80% of North American product developers (Cooper, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 2008). Research partnerships adapt it in three ways. Gates carry two criteria, technical readiness and commercial relevance, and a project must clear both. Gates can be fuzzy: the committee neither releases the next tranche nor ends the work, but names the evidence it wants next. And every gate closes with one of four outcomes, Go, Kill, Hold, or Recycle (Cooper, 2014).

In practice, the quarterly steering committee meeting is the gate review.

Where this comes from

The definition follows Cooper, "What's Next? After Stage-Gate", 2014 (https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12110).

What Helikon does with it

Our Research Project Management Toolkit lists gate definition with technical and commercial criteria among its 33 must-have practices, with fuzzy gates as an option.