Abstracts

While the word innovation gets a lot of airplay, it usually plays second fiddle to delivering projects on time and keeping the lights on (BAU, Ops work). We might hold the odd hackathon, or give people 'innovation time' on a Friday afternoon (but only if they've completed all their 'real' work). But while we might recognise innovation is important, and we'll only survive long term by 'Outlearning the Competition', organisations struggle to encourage and leverage it in a sustainable way.

We can define innovation as ‘the discovery, development and concrete implementation of new ideas’. Therefore it involves exploration (for discovery), learning (to develop) and delivery (to implement). While traditional, plan-driven development focuses only on delivery, agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban have knowledge creation, learning and innovation at their centre. Waterfall assumes the discovery and learning have already occurred, and that we know before we start what the most valuable features are and how long it will take to implement them. There is little focus on exploration or learning, leading to low support for innovation. In fact, these are often discouraged as they might endanger ‘the deadline’.

Agile isn’t just about churning out code - it supports exploration and discovery with rapid learning by providing high quality feedback and a fail-safe culture. As we discover new knowledge, we can then redesign our solutions and rework our plans appropriately - that is, we can be ‘agile’. By combining exploration and discovery with concrete implementation (e.g. in Scrum you deliver production ready software every sprint), agile bakes innovation into the heart of the way we work. it ‘Builds Innovation In’ rather that treating it as a distinct activity, carried out separately from the work of software delivery.

In this short talk, I’ll elaborate on some core agile concepts that support innovation - from both human and systems viewpoints.