Title: Decision making in gates: based on formal basis or gut feeling?

Authors: Asa Kastensson; Christian Johansson

Addresses: Functional Product Development, Lulea University of Technology, 971 87 Lulea, Sweden. ' Functional Product Development, Lulea University of Technology, 971 87 Lulea, Sweden

Abstract: Manufacturing companies continuously deal with development of innovations. Many of these are cancelled on the way, in gate meetings. This paper investigates why technologies are cancelled, and on which basis managers make decisions. The paper is based on a study from the automotive industry with interviews with different stakeholders in the gates. The most common reasons for stopping projects were time, cost and technology readiness. Gut feeling is found to be an important factor when evaluating projects. This paper concludes that managers need to understand the role of intuition and query for this subjective information in addition to objective measures.

Keywords: decision making; stage-gates; automotive product development; product innovation; technology development; automobile industry; gate meetings; product cancellation; technology cancellation; technology management; project cancellation; intuition; subjective information.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTIP.2011.043199

International Journal of Technology Intelligence and Planning, 2011 Vol.7 No.2, pp.140 - 152

Published online: 19 Oct 2011 *

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