The 7 Essential Ingredients of Agile Innovation

It is crucial to stand out among the crowd in a world filled with so many innovations. Organizations that want to improve their innovation impact need to implement a high-impact strategy. We will be exploring the seven essential ingredients of agile innovation.

Agile is the ability to think/understand quickly and move quickly and flexibly. Agile innovation helps teams deliver high-impact innovations. It consists of constant testing and experimenting to solve a problem. The ultimate goal is to provide innovation that is scalable and sustainable.

It is essential to keep in mind that agile innovation is a process. When viewing the agile innovation framework, understand that it’s not a “one size fits all.” It would be best if you adapted this framework to your organization.

The Seven Essential Ingredients of Agile Innovation

The first ingredient of agile innovation is collaborating with stakeholders or those that benefit from what you deliver. Collaborate closely with them because this helps you build a shared understanding of the problem. From this, you’ll gain a higher likelihood of success and ensure met needs.

The second essential ingredient is focusing on high-impact innovations. Focusing on impact helps ensure the value of impact delivered. The team needs to be on the same page in this process. The third ingredient is a culture of continuous experiments. Continuous experiments help organizations learn fast and make decisions that lead to sustainable results.

In 2020, we had Stefan Thomke from Harvard Business School on the show, and he wrote an excellent book on this topic. The fourth ingredient is self-organizing teams. These teams are responsible and accountable for their work. They don’t have to wait for permission to take action, which speeds up decision-making and execution. Define and agree on the problem statement, and let the team execute.

The fifth essential ingredient is a cross-disciplinary team. Teams with diverse backgrounds and skillsets are unique and powerful. The sixth ingredient is the right innovation agility metrics. These are not just usual innovation metrics such as the 3M metric used to ensure that new product revenue grows. An agile-specific metric would be something like how many things are in your innovation queue. Stick with a few metrics, and don’t go overboard with them.

The seventh essential ingredient of agile innovation is short iterative ideation, testing, prototyping, and repeat cycles. This is done in a structured way. Keep aggressive schedules with planned progress towards the execution. Remember that if you run into a wall and something is simply not working, stop. Be willing to kill the project and move on to the next.

To know more about the essential ingredients of agile innovation, listen to this week's show: The 7 Essential Ingredients of Agile Innovation.