Research oublished by Bob Cooper in Canada has shown that corporate project portfolios are becoming less innovative. One of the reasons is that systems like the Stage-Gate® product development process that emphasise heavy upfront planning put innovation in a straitjacket. They tend to favour low risk innovation outcomes.  Real innovation is complex and requires flexibility to accommodate shifting customer and market expectations. To drive innovation, product development processes must be flexible enough to deal with changes as close to market launch as possible. This cannot  easily be accommodated with traditional stage gate processes where designs are frozen at the front end and conventional wisdom suggests that unacceptable costs occur if changes are made later in the development process.

Agile product development processes on the other hand are designed to build flexibility into the development process by creating and enhancing development options, delaying decisions and in general reducing the cost of change. Agile processes balance the pay-off between the cost of change and profitability from more innovative products and services. Over the last 10 years adoption of agile methods has revolutionised the software development industry and led to a huge improvement in project success and customer satisfaction.  There is now an opportunity to use these same approaches to drive innovation in conventional (ie physical) products and service.

Scrum is an agile management framework, based on lean principles, within which complex products and services can be developed. Scrum emphases cross-functional teamwork and is a metaphor for the game of rugby in which the team packs together to move the ball forward. In Scrum, work is structured in cycles of work called sprints, iterations of work that are typically two to four weeks in duration. During each sprint, teams pull from a prioritised list of customer requirements, so that the features that are developed first are of the highest value to the customer. At the end of each sprint, an increment of customer value is delivered.  The process is highly flexible because at the end of each sprint the customer has the opportunity to review the product so that it can be adapted as requirements evolve.

Although Agile methods and Scrum has been used extensively in the software development industry for over 10 years, application of these approaches to traditional new product development has only recently received attention. The Stage-Gate® Process is the predominant management approach used in this sector over the last 20 years. The adoption of agile product development methods and Scrum in particular to traditional new product development is a new and emerging area. It has the potential to revolutionise the management of new product development and the delivery of innovative solutions to customers.  It has the potential to be the next “big thing” in new product development management thinking