Recapping the past week and introducing the next.

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?

As promised, here is the first of five ingredients for your plan to transform product innovation activities into a core business process.

One of the toughest, yet most important steps you need to take is to get senior management and all product-related departments on the same page. It's tough because you'll need to align the objectives and metrics for product development with the company's overall business goals. And that will ruffle some feathers.

You begin by creating an integrated product innovation framework. The framework specifies the limits of what your product departments should and should not consider as investment candidates. And it helps cross-functional product teams target their work where it is the most beneficial (meaning, "profitable").

The elements of the framework are...

Leave it to The Nielsen Company to uncover the dirty little secret of how innovation really happens.

In a recent study of the consumer packaged goods industry, Nielsen found out that when senior executives influence product decisions, things go terribly wrong. In fact, companies with innovation teams located far from the corporate headquarters generate 80% more new product revenue than those where the bosses can easily get involved.

More remarkably, that number goes to 130% more for companies with well-defined innovation processes.

The title is more a statement than a question.

Transparency is not just visibility, but a commitment to an open conversation.

I recently posted some thoughts about a Harvard Business Review article written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter in which she describes the innovation system as a three-layered pyramid.

At the base of Dr. Kantor’s pyramid are process improvements and incremental product changes. In the middle are new product initiatives that show signs of promise but need more nurturing. Sitting at the peak are the market changers. These are the ones we dream about. The ones that will win us those seats next to Jack Nicholson at the Lakers games.

In my post, I suggested that before enterprise managers even think about building a pyramid, they need to demolish the territorial and cultural barriers that separate each of these functions. Too many organizations treat incremental development as the poor relation while giving new-product and new-technology development all the attention. And the funding.

Another consequence of this stovepipe structure is that while companies rightly look at incremental development as a response to the marketplace, they hope and expect blockbusters to come bursting out of the laboratory. It’s the mad scientist view of development.

But companies that bank on these Eureka moments confuse invention with innovation.

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!

This is the third and final post in this Scaling Agile series. I've written about the triangle of traps, the challenges of developing complex systems, and smart requirements and intelligent backlogs. In a recent conversation with John Haniotis, VP of Products at Accept, we discussed how to ensure successful adoption of agile methodologies in a large company. John’s experience with enterprise wide adoption of agile (at Intuit) points to two areas to pay attention to: mitigating risk of organizational change and managing the transition.