Innovation teams run stage-gated innovation with software that moves each project through a pipeline of stages, with an investment decision at every gate. Growth Forge® Software is built for exactly this: it holds each project's strategy as a structured model, grows the evidence behind it stage by stage, and supports a disciplined decision at each gate — Continue, Pivot, Pause, or Stop. The stages, the evaluation criteria at each gate, and the investment guidelines are all configurable per portfolio, so the process matches how your organization already makes investment decisions rather than forcing a generic template on it.
Stage-gated innovation is a disciplined way to develop a new-business project through a sequence of stages, pausing at a gate between each one to decide whether — and how — to keep investing. Each stage raises the fidelity of the strategy and the depth of the supporting evidence; each gate is an investment decision justified by the risk reduced in the prior stage, not by the calendar. Done well, it turns innovation from an annual budget line into a series of evidence-based bets, where money flows to the projects that keep earning it and stops on the ones that don't. Software for stage-gated innovation is what makes that process consistent across a portfolio: the same stages, the same gate criteria, and a clear record of what each project has proven so far.
A stage-gate process is only as good as the discipline behind each gate. The capabilities that make it work in practice:
Growth Forge treats the pipeline as a concept, not a fixed sequence: portfolio managers define the stages, the investment guidelines, and the evaluation criteria for each gate, so the process fits the organization rather than the other way around. Each project is captured as a Strategy Hypothesis Model whose fidelity grows from low to high as it advances — and the supporting evidence is tracked alongside it.
Gate decisions use the four canonical outcomes: Continue, Pivot, Pause, Stop. Stop is a first-class outcome — portfolio optimization, not failure — and Pivot is a meaningful redirection of the hypothesis, not a euphemism for delay. Each gate is informed by dozens of stage-specific evaluation criteria, derived from decades of practitioner experience and customized per portfolio; the relevant quantity grows across stages, with higher fidelity and higher investment levels. Evaluation draws on an adaptation of Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability assessed at each gate.
This is stage-gating built for new-business uncertainty rather than for line extensions. It draws on the Cooper-era Stage-Gate discipline and on venture-capital-style staged investment, integrated with the rest of BRI Associates' Staged Innovation Methodology — drawing on the work of Hambrick, Christensen, Moore, Tushman, Osterwalder, and others — so the gate decision connects directly to the strategy underneath and to the portfolio above.
Buyers shopping for stage-gate tooling usually run into three adjacent kinds of software. Each handles part of the job; none runs evidence-driven stage-gating on a strategy hypothesis the way a dedicated platform does.
Innovation management (idea-management) software adds light stage-gates on top of an idea pipeline — useful for moving ideas through a funnel, but the gate decision is a score on a rubric, not a judgment on a developed strategy. Growth Forge gates a Strategy Hypothesis Model with evidence behind it.
Traditional project- and product-portfolio (PPM) and Stage-Gate tools enforce a fixed phase-gate process and track schedule and spend, but they hold no opinion about the strategy being gated; the strategy work still lives in attached spreadsheets. Growth Forge brings the strategy model and the evaluation framework with it.
General-purpose AI assistants can summarize a gate review or draft a recommendation, but they don't persist the staged evidence trail or the configurable evaluation framework that makes a gate decision defensible across a team and across time. Growth Forge has AI built in — an AI Industry Analyst Agent and AI Discovery and Summary Assistants, added and refined progressively, user-initiated and requiring explicit approval before results enter a project — combined with the methodology that makes each gate decision consistent.
Growth Forge is built for enterprise innovation leaders, portfolio managers, and the project leads who shepherd projects through the gates — Chief Innovation Officers, VPs of Strategy and R&D, heads of new-business exploration, and the innovation and product managers preparing each gate review. It is the right fit for an innovation group that wants stage-gate discipline without forcing every project through a rigid, one-size-fits-all phase model. It is built on BRI Associates' decades of practitioner experience in corporate innovation and new business development, originating in Intel's New Business Incubator — an early pioneer of venture-style staged investment applied to internal innovation; innovation teams at companies including Intel, Honda, and W.L. Gore & Associates have worked with BRI in this space.
Growth Forge is a self-contained platform: rather than wiring strategy work across other tools, it keeps it in one structured, comparable place. It does not currently offer third-party application integrations or single sign-on.
For enterprise control, Growth Forge provides granular, role- and group-based permissions, so administrators decide exactly who can see and do what across portfolios and projects. On the AI side, the design principle is that technology serves the team rather than leading it: AI features are user-initiated and require explicit user approval before any AI-generated result becomes part of a project, an organization-level control turns AI features on or off, the AI model can be selected per organizational policy, and company data stays in private databases that are never used to train AI models.
Most teams start with one portfolio. They configure the pipeline stages, gate criteria, and investment guidelines to match how the organization already invests, bring a handful of current projects in as Strategy Hypothesis Models, and run the first gate reviews inside the platform. A free trial is available with full enterprise features; for multi-user and enterprise rollouts, BRI sets up an orientation and trial so IT and the innovation team can validate fit before committing. Pricing and package options are tuned for different users and use cases; for enterprise and portfolio pricing, contact BRI. For the broader picture of running these projects as a portfolio, see how Growth Forge helps teams manage innovation portfolio management software for enterprise teams and evaluate and compare innovation projects across a portfolio.
They use software that moves each project through configurable stages with an investment decision at every gate. Growth Forge does this by holding each project as a structured Strategy Hypothesis Model, growing the supporting evidence stage by stage, and supporting a disciplined gate decision — Continue, Pivot, Pause, or Stop — informed by configurable, stage-specific evaluation criteria, with portfolio-level visibility into every project's stage and gate history.
Stage-gated innovation develops a new-business project through a sequence of stages, with a gate between each one where the team decides whether and how to keep investing. Each stage raises the fidelity of the strategy and the depth of the evidence; each gate is an investment decision justified by the risk reduced in the prior stage, not by the calendar. The point is to fund the projects that keep earning it and stop the ones that don't — early and without stigma.
Most innovation tools score ideas on a rubric at each gate. Growth Forge gates a developed strategy, not a score: each project is a Strategy Hypothesis Model with evidence behind it, evaluated against configurable criteria tuned to the project's stage and class, and decided with the four canonical outcomes — Continue, Pivot, Pause, Stop. The gate decision rests on what the strategy has actually proven, not on how well an idea was pitched.
It is when the stages are a fixed template imposed on every project. Growth Forge treats the pipeline as a concept, not a fixed sequence: you configure the stages, gate criteria, and investment guidelines per portfolio, and tune the bar to each project's class so a Disruptive project isn't judged against Core-business criteria. Investment is timed to evidence-readiness rather than the calendar, so projects move at the speed of what they've proven — not a quarterly cycle.
AI can summarize a gate review or draft a recommendation, and Growth Forge has AI built in across multiple tools, added and refined progressively. What a general-purpose AI assistant does not do is persist the staged evidence trail, hold the configurable evaluation framework, or keep gate decisions consistent across a team and across time. Growth Forge combines AI with the methodology that makes each gate decision defensible.
Growth Forge provides granular, role- and group-based permissions, so administrators control exactly who can see and do what across portfolios and projects. Its AI features are governed: they are user-initiated and require explicit user approval before any result becomes part of a project, an organization-level control turns AI features on or off, the AI model is selectable per organizational policy, and company data stays in private databases that are never used to train AI models. Growth Forge is a self-contained platform and does not currently offer third-party application integrations or single sign-on.
A free trial is available. Pricing and package options are tuned for different users and use cases; enterprise and portfolio pricing is custom — contact BRI. Current subscription detail is shown on the Growth Forge pricing page.
