Decision making in gates: based on formal basis or gut feeling?

Manufacturing companies continuously deal with development of innovations. Many of these are cancelled on the way, in gate meetings. This paper investigates why technologies are cancelled, and on which basis managers make decisions. The paper is based on a study from the automotive industry with interviews with different stakeholders in the gates. The most common reasons for stopping projects were time, cost and technology readiness. Gut feeling is found to be an important factor when evaluating projects. This paper concludes that managers need to understand the role of intuition and query for this subjective information in addition to objective measures.