The "hero" funnel
How do you select ideas and turn them into effective innovations?

The "hero" funnel coexists a standardized funnel with a heroic mode. It's a classic R&D process (Stage&Gate), which can prove cumbersome, with progressive selection of ideas and difficulty in killing projects once they've been launched. It has very limited resources to support potential innovations proposed by the field, which have not managed to get past the initial selection of ideas. As a result, these ideas are carried at arm's length by tenacious individuals with strong personalities who end up – sometimes – getting their ideas recognized and having them placed in "official" project portfolios.