According to Mike Dalton (Industry Week), innovation requires risk and the goal of a firewall is to identify that risk. The firewall block projects that score low on five feasibilities i.e. commercial, technical, manufacturability, regulatory and intellectual property. At the project charter stage, it is useful to identify all of the stakeholders and solicit their input on all the potential ways the project could fail and what the impact would be. A study of the telephony industry (Ogawa & Ketner, 1997) showed that bottom 80% performers cancelled nearly 30% of their projects late in the process and about top 20% top companies cancelled the same percentage of projects early. Read more at: http://www.industryweek.com/product-development/obstacles-new-product-growth