5. The agility organization

In the final stage, companies succeed in merging all innovation channels by treating innovation as a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary issue, identifying and making the most of external sources of innovation or of their own R&D. They manage to implement, on an industrial scale, an agile, permeable and well-equipped ideal funnel, thus rediscovering the virtues of their origins. In practice, the companies in our study are almost all in stages 1 to 4, with only a few displaying some of the characteristics of the ultimate stage 5. This shows just how far we still have to go to achieve a process for managing ideas and projects that is not too rigid, yet sufficiently organized.