R&D Portfolio Funnel: Stage-Gate Attrition Under a Budget (2D)

Technology development rarely advances one project at a time — organisations fund a whole cohort and expect most of it to fail along the way. This 2D simulator renders that cohort as a swarm of dots moving down a five-stage funnel — Concept, Feasibility, Development, Validation, Launch — where each of the four gates between stages independently kills a fraction of the projects that reach it, and every surviving project's passage costs real money drawn from one fixed total budget that is never replenished. Because cost per project rises sharply toward Launch, the simulator can — and does — stop funding a project the instant the shared budget runs out, even when that project would otherwise have survived its gate review. Tune the cohort size, the four gate attrition rates, the four per-stage costs and the total budget, then run gate rounds one at a time (or straight through) and watch the live funnel, the budget bar and the stage-by-stage counts show exactly how many projects are cut by review versus cut off purely by funding.