Iac-11-d3.4.7 Patterns of Innovation at Nasa: Explaining Switchbacks in Maturity

R&D management practices typically conceptualize complex product innovation as a Stage-Gate process whereby novel concepts are matured through a succession of development stages and progressively winnowed down at each sequential gate. This view implicitly assumes that maturity is a monotonically increasing function of the technology, and that partially matured technologies can be restored from the “shelf” for future maturation, baring obsolescence. However, based on detailed empirical evidence this paper demonstrates how, in practice, the pathways taken by new capabilities do not respect these assumptions. In particular, rather than being a monotonically increasing function in time, particular innovations draw simultaneously from funding mechanisms targeted at different Technology Readiness Level (TRL) ranges, and loop back to win “early stage” grants decades into their development. This phenomenon of “hierarchical switchbacks” is explained in terms of the working-level strategies of re-scoping and branching out.