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.

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.

A product management consulting group called Brainmates did an interesting survey on social media and product management.

The survey was a series of questions that all start with "Do you use social media to...?" The answers were yes, yes and yes. We use social media for everything... except to get feedback about our products.

A survey like this has a lot of bias, because answering "yes" equates to "I'm doing my job" and answering "no" could mean "I may be missing something". The natural inclination is to respond with yes, which makes the anomaly statistic even more compelling.

We all know (I hope) that we should be using social, collaborative tools to gather feedback from our customers that impact product development, so why aren't we?