Agility is key to clearing challenges in innovation.
Innovation strategy is all about being nimble while balancing the need for change against changing simply in order to chase a shiny objective. In other words, you should move fast, but avoid breaking things until you know exactly what you’re smashing. So, how do you develop an agile innovation strategy that doesn’t rush past what’s important?
The Agile Cycle
Agile innovation works in a cycle, where tasks are divided up into shorter sprints. Think of it like running a mile by sprinting a few yards, stopping to catch a breath, then sprinting again. First, you go through the step, preferably something simple and short. For example, you might have as your first step evaluating customer needs. So, you work through that quickly, surveying customers, reading emails they’ve sent in, looking at how your customers use your product and what surprising uses they might put it to. Try to fit these sprints into a quick, but reasonable time frame, especially if your team has other responsibilities. And remember to leave room for surprises; what seems simple is often much harder than we at first think.
The next step is to reassess your goals. For example, your research might tell you that some uses you anticipated as popular fall a bit flat, or that there’s one use in particular that stands out among your data — a use customers engage in that you didn’t expect. Finally, you adapt your plans; perhaps you can rule out a bunch of anticipated steps. Perhaps you have to draft up some new steps. But once you have that in mind, you take your next sprint.
Agility helps you clear rough terrain.
Agile Innovation In The Long Term
This can seem, quite a bit, like focusing on the short-term, and if you’re not careful, your team can become too focused on the sprint and find themselves running in carefully researched, well-thought-out circles. So, be sure to work two actions into your agile innovation strategy.
The first is to be sure to incorporate data outside your innovation project with every reassessment. Part of your reassessment should be looking at your broader industry and your competitors to see how they’re approaching problems and what innovation they’re pursuing. If, for example, they have a new product come out and it’s a hit, that’s worth looking at, especially if your customers are telling you they don’t want that product.
Second, keep in mind your long-term goals and needs, not just for your innovation strategy, but across the company. Any sprint you take should not only serve to lead you to the next sprint, but also to your larger goal. This doesn’t have to be an enormous distance to your larger goal. It can be a simple baby step. But forward momentum is forward momentum.
Being agile is important in innovation because once the rubber meets the road, your projections for the future go out the window. As the pace of technology picks up, as more industries see new and disruptive companies enter, innovation is simply going to unfold in faster and more surprising ways. Keep in mind the fundamental purpose of agility is to dodge obstacles, and any business can expect plenty more of those as the pace picks up. To learn more, join our newsletter.
