Contextual Innovation Management Using a Stage‐Gate Platform: The Case of Philips Shaving and Beauty

To improve its innovation process, P hilips S having and B eauty ( S & B ) designed a blueprint for its innovation process. Although it has proved to be quite effective, it has experienced a lack of efficiency, in terms of frequent cost and time overruns, in the fuzzy front end of this process. We suggest a contextual innovation management approach to set up a stage‐gate‐based innovation process platform and thus improve the efficiency in the fuzzy front end, which means that, for different contexts, stage‐gate process variants will be designed from which unnecessary activities are removed and important activities are emphasized. The design is based on the identification of relevant contextual factors to develop variations of the common innovation process within P hilips S & B . We distinguished different variants of the innovation processes within P hilips S & B that can increase the efficiency in the fuzzy front end. Based on interviews within and outside P hilips S & B , we identified problems and potential solutions with regard to efficiency in eight recently finished innovation processes. The results indicate that the most important contextual factors are the distinction between incremental and radical innovations, and between market and technology‐based innovations. We used these factors to design three variants on the basic platform of the stage‐gate process.