Toward a genealogy of project management: Sidewinder and the management of exploratory projects

This paper deals with the management of exploratory projects, i.e. projects where neither the goals nor the means to attain them can be defined at the beginning. It relies on the historical case study of the Sidewinder Air-to-Air missile, designed by the US Navy between 1947 and 1957. The case is interesting because it violated all the best practices of PM, yet involved a short and cheap development process that resulted in a best-seller in missile history. This case thus helps to analyze the inner working of an understudied skunkworks (project-level) and to discuss the governance of exploratory projects (firm-level), more specifically the limits of Stage-Gate processes for radical innovations.