This article is taken from MovesTheNeedle site https://www.movestheneedle.com/blog, by Brant Cooper

You can’t have a complete lean innovation practice without the agile component.

Agile refers to a set of values noted in the Agile Manifesto and primarily refers to a company or unit being able to quickly adapt and respond to new information rather than being forced to stick to a plan.
The agile manifesto, which was introduced in 2001, prioritizes short product development “sprints” in order to incorporate new information which might come from a variety of places such as new technology, customer input, insights, or development issues.

Instead of assuming that businesses know exactly what the customers need and then build the product heads-down over the course of months or years, they can release early versions quickly and incorporate customer input.
This flexibility is typical within small company and software environments, but much more difficult to achieve at an enterprise level, which is much of the reason why many large corporations are slow to act in the face of disruption and cannot move as quickly when customer tastes shift.

Again, agility is not just for products.
Agility in opportunity assessment, development and commercialization s key because you can’t just come up with the plan and execute. You need a structured process for pausing, incorporating customer empathy and validating assumptions before moving to the next step.
Agile methodology provides this structure.

It’s not that everyone will have sprints as fast as a small software company, but that the cadence is determined by complexity of the product and business model.
Think of a product that didn’t perform in the market as you expected.
Can you think of anything you could have tested prior to launch that might have indicated you were going down the right path?
What sort of sprint length would you need have needed to capture that opportunity to test viability?

To be continued …