Decisions

Not all innovation programs use Decisions. If your program is "ungated", i.e. does not require a Decision to advance an Idea or Project, you may not see this feature in the LaunchPath interface.

Decisions are a critical part of the innovation process in LaunchPath. Any time an Idea or Project has completed a Stage and is ready to move forward, a decision must be made to determine its fitness for continued development. The LaunchPath system stores information about each of these Decisions for the purpose of documenting an Idea's lifecycle, as well as for the purpose of program analysis.

A Decision record consists of:

the Decision "action" (e.g. "Approve", "Decline")
if approved, what Stage the Idea or Project is approved for
if approved, what resources are made available to the innovator (e.g. time and funds)

How decisions are made

How a Decision is made differs based on Program settings. By default, a Program's innovation process is what we refer to as "un-gated" – the innovator is free to make these decisions on their own, and move their Project forward as they see fit. However, there are multiple "gated" methods of controlling these advancements.

Automated

An organization can choose to let an Idea be approved for advancement to a Project based on an algorithmic determination. For instance, if specially-selected individuals have evaluated an Idea and reached a majority consensus, the Idea is automatically marked as "Approved" for advancement, at which point the innovator is notified that they can move their Idea forward.

Case-by-Case

Selected individuals can be given the authority to make a Decision about any submitted Idea or Project.