What can Agile process provide to investors in innovation?

The idea of using an Agile approach to investing in innovation is nothing new. The BBC Innovation Labs have been doing this for many years through providing single iteration support to those with an interesting idea. The BBC invest in many companies producing a demonstrable first version of their idea before deciding to invest further. This approach massively reduces the BBC's risk as they are able to see both whether the idea has legs once it becomes demonstrable and if the development team are up to the job.

This use of single iteration development terms is used as a way of selling Agile development by providing massively reduced investment risk through only committing to a single iteration while delivering working code. This means that at the end of the iteration the buyer can take the code to another development team if they so wish. In the case of the Innovation Labs it is likely that the BBC would retain some degree of exploitation rights to the IP should they wish to take a good idea that was badly realised to another team.

The fact that Agile is so effective at marrying formalised project and product development management with creative and innovative process means that this is a no brainer for those that have worked in this way. Having talked to a number of investment organisations recently, it appears that Agile offers another potentially useful tool in addition to monitoring progress that can be tied to investment rounds as used by the BBC. This is effective communication.

The process of using stories and prioritisation enables the investor to see exactly what decisions are being made and to interrogate the rational behind prioritisation. If an investor takes part in the transition from iteration to iteration they have a clear picture of what is going on and are able to feel sure that their money is being spent realistically. The investor will also able to see the progress being made through the presentation of demonstrable tested development. This provides clear windows for investor communication while leaving the innovator free to get on with their work during actual iterations.

Therefore Agile's embracing and normalisation of constant change and risk (essential ingredients of innovation) combined with a process that effectively exposes this makes it a perfect process for allowing a better relationship between investors and innovators.

The Innovation Edge

The Innovation Edge, Nesta's 18 monthly conference, took place on 20th May 2008 at the Festival Hall. Jonathan Kestenbaum, Nesta's Cheif Executive, was determined to show just how far the organisation has moved on under his stewardship by reflecting on the difference between this gathering and the last one at The Business Design Centre in Islington in 2006, shortly after he took the reigns. I am not in a position to comment on whether Nesta is a very different beast to its previous incarnation, but if the key note speakers on show are anything to go on then they certainly seem to have moved up a league.

The key note session was chaired by Jonathan Freedland and began with Jonathan interviewing none other than Sir Tim Burners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. Sir Tim appeared every bit the modest unassuming and selfless socially motivated scientist that you one might expect from the person who invented arguably the most important innovation since the industrial revolution. He jokingly reminisced how his initial proposal to create the www was described by his manager at CERN as being 'vague but interesting' and how he was only able to work on it in down time between his important work.

Sir Tim was followed by Bob Geldof (no hyper link required) who stole the show with a witty, invigorating and critical speech that seamlessly bridged the conference theme of sustaining UK innovation with a call to arms on how innovation can do so much more to help people in Africa work their way out of poverty. He made the point that Europe should do more to use its innovation capital to help Africa. He reflected despite the fact Africa lies just 8 miles off the southern coast of Spain and Europe remains the richest continent in the world, China is investing so much more in Africa that European nations.

The afternoon began in similar big hitter style with none other than Gordon Brown providing 10 minutes of surprisingly relaxed informal comment and even a couple of jokes in support of UK innovation.

If Nesta is able to become as good as the speakers on show in effecting positive change and sustaining innovation then they really will have moved a long way in the last 18 months. I look forward to seeing how they appear in another 18 months time.

Baby Steps: Agile and the Small Creative Business

The founding idea of Agile Lab was to take innovative thinking from Agile methods such as XP and Scrum and introduce them to a wider constituency.

We worked together with an organisation called Creative Northants to understand the issues facing five small creative businesses in Northamptonshire. None of these businesses had any connection with software development or computing. We visited each business at their premises and interviewed them about the challenges that they faced as creative businesses in Northamptonshire. The resulting report was described by our client Will Pearson at Creative Northants as "excellent" and "very helpful".

We identified three areas in which these small creative businesses were having difficulty: business networking, marketing and knowledge of IT. We are obviously not the first to identify this kind of problem, especially with regard to marketing. A great deal of arts funding seems to require the businesses to produce a "business plan". Several of our interviews had been required to produce such plans to get government funding. None of them had delivered on these plans. In one case we heard of a major arts organisation that had been required to produce a detailed business plan in order to get funding, but had then not taken any steps to execute the plan for over two years (and counting).

At Agile Lab we felt that there were ways of helping these organisations without the need for a detailed long-term plan. Using the extreme programming principle of "start from where you are" and "you can always do something" we ran a workshop for our five interviewees. For each category of business networking, marketing and IT knowledge we asked them to write a short statement of something that they would like to do in that area - in Agile we call these statements "stories". We then asked them to write a "test" - how they would know when they had done that thing. This is something that is very different from a test for a piece of software. A piece of software either works or it doesn't, a conversation at a networking event make take years to pay off. We also asked them to estimate how much effort each task would take. Then (if you know anything about Agile, this won't be a surprise) we asked our workshop participants to prioritise their stories and come up with a set of stories that they feel they could deliver on in a period of three months.

Three months later we ran another workshop. In one-on-one interviews we carried out a retrospective on the iterations that our interviewees had put together. We were pleased to see that each of our participants had made progress in line with the iterations that they'd outlined. Each of our participants had done some marketing and some networking. Using the Agile concepts of story writing, prioritisation and iteration planning we managed to break an intimidating task that was at risk of not being done at all into manageable pieces.