I’m especially pleased to see Forrester analyst Tom Grant applying Agile principles, visibility and collaboration into his own research. Tom’s conducting research on thought leadership in which the entire process will be visible online and the online community can have input into the research methodology.

I’d like to encourage our readers to participate in Tom’s research on thought-leadership at http://community.forrester.com/docs/DOC-3383. He’s already got a great dialog happening on what thought leadership is and how you measure it. Community input will be used to adjust the methodology and outcome of Tom’s research.

Tom Grant at Forrester writes an excellent blog on product management, in which he recently graced us by mentioning Accept in his post on “The Unrecognized Success of the Requirements Tool Market.” To be sure, awareness for solutions like ours is growing fast. In fact in our latest earnings announcement we highlighted record financial results and aggressive expansion plans.

Tom asks his readers why there’s a sudden interest in requirements tools and the business problem they’re tied to. You’ll have to read Tom’s blog to get his own answer to the question in an upcoming post, but we also thought we’d let you know what we think here.

Innovation has been the lifeblood of high-tech companies, so why is interest on the rise just now?

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We’ve just announced our new Transparency webinar series – featuring industry experts including Tom Grant and Roy Wildeman of Forrester Research Inc.; Brian Lawley, the author of Expert Product Management; and renowned blogger Scott Selhorst!

Absolutely a fantastic line up – brought together in this series to help product managers increase organizational agility and enable faster, confident decision making through transparency, real time analytics, collaboration and communication across the entire product innovation lifecycle.

For more information, visit our webinar page. We hope you can join us for these exciting events.

Tom Grant has added three more counterproductive types to the original road map category list from the  Product Beautiful blog: A Case for Better Roadmaps.

He has netted out what so many of us have experienced over the years, and companies. In my opinion, roadmaps become road accidents because the voice of the markets either never enter into the product innovation process or is ignored. Validating a roadmap back to the market – to the very people who participated in ideation – is a great way of keeping the product strategy aligned to the company strategy and market opportunity. Circumvents the ’shoot the messenger’ syndrome and helps manage HiPPOs (highest paid person’s opinion).

What types of roadmaps have you encountered? We want to know!

On Monday, May 17, 2010, from 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Eastern time (18:00-19:00 UK time),  Tom Grant, Ph.D. from Forrester Research will host a teleconference on Requirements Tools.

“…the adage “the right tool for the right job” definitely applies to requirements tools. We have segmented the requirements tool market by the business problems that they address.”

Teleconference Agenda:

• The ROI of requirements tools
• Different business problems, different tools
• How the needs of IT and TI differ
• Recommendations and next steps

You can find more information about this event at http://www.forrester.com/rb/teleconference/requirements_tools_address_different_business_problems/q/id/6281/t/1. A teleconference registration fee may be required.