Dr Chirag Madhukar Buch, Senior Research Director and Head of Innovation, Ipsos MENAFor long, the Stage Gate process has been the guiding light for corporates wanting to drive product innovation in the industry. The gates were well defined and told exactly what had to be done and in what sequence.
Most large organisations had a playbook that clearly highlighted the process along with the role of market research in identifying, testing or validating innovation opportunities. However, there were challenges with this approach
It was expected to be linear and rigid – most stage gates are linear in nature i.e. only when one gate has been passed, the next opens. A successful idea generation exercise opens Concept development, a winning concept paves the way for product development and evaluation and so on. You couldn’t necessarily go back to the earlier stage basis feedback from the existing gate. The scope to improve concept basis product feedback or using inputs on packaging to enhance product delivery was rare or out of the playbook
It was siloed – at each stage of product development, a different client team was involved; and each worked independent to one another. Concept development was the responsibility of marketing, product was research and development’s (R&D’s) baby, packaging was to be developed by the design team and so on. More often than not, consumer insights trickled from one team and one gate to the other.
It was time consuming – the stage gates had two components. The research part and the development part. Insights would feed into the idea, concept, product or pack improvement, which the marketing, R&D or design team would implement before going to the next step. Hence a typical new product launch could take four to six months of research and developmental work before hitting the shelves.
It was expensive – an obvious fall out of the above was higher costs, both absolute and opportunity costs. Taking six month to go to market was laden with risks of cost overruns as well as threats of competition making a faster move.
Enter artificial intelligence (AI)…
And the boundaries between the gates have started to become blur and the gates have become now two-way.
With expert prompts and AI models trained with rich innovation databases, clients are now discovering unmet consumer needs, generating hundreds of ideas and eventually developing winning concepts in record time.
Not only that, embedding AI in your innovation journey can help generate concepts from product experience and in the same cycle generate packaging improvements as well.
This means a long-drawn research program that would include exploratory work, workshops, quantitative assessments and testing spread across four to six months is now giving way to an AI powered exploration and quantification exercise.
The outcome is a robust innovation pipeline generation in less than half the time and fraction of earlier cost. In this entire endeavour, AI is not compromising on rigor and robustness but instead working alongside Human Intelligence to transform processes that were time consuming and expensive.
This is the new era of innovation where the stage gates disappear; development, optimisation, and validation occurs simultaneously and innovation can now begin with any part of the mix, such as the product or packaging.
Shattering of the stage gates while combining human intelligence with artificial intelligence means that the marketing mix elements are no longer siloed or sequential, innovation cycles are faster and the innovations have a better chance to succeed in market.
by Dr Chirag Madhukar Buch, Senior Research Director and Head of Innovation, Ipsos MENA
