Linking Innovation to Agile Methods
Do agile methods work for innovation?
For improvements (what we call incremental innovations), standard agile methods, lean approaches and stage gated models are all suitable. For radical innovation, where you deal with uncertainty and novel areas such as emerging technology or a new way of working, we offer specific and complementary methods reducing the risk and increasing the speed.
How?
When working with innovation, you must identify the balance between improvements (= incremental innovation) and leaps (= radical innovation), and decide on short-, mid- and long-term risk as well as the resources at your disposal. You also need to link this balance to your strategy. Dealing with radical innovation means dealing with uncertainty. The uncertainty is of a kind in this case that makes it impossible to divide expected work in to sprints or story points or other agile concepts. Radical innovation needs to be treated holistically and with structured experiments.
Result
Carve out where Agile works in your organization and combine with holistic methodology for innovation maanegement.