The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Innovation: Applying Agile Outside the Boundaries of Software
At the recent two-day Optimizing Innovation Conference, Xerox’s Francois Ragnet presented Xerox’s approach to make services more innovative. It’s not an easy thing, partly because the basic nature of innovation seems to be at odds with the concept of services being something that are repeatable and well defined.
Xerox sees a large part of their future business focusing on services, particularly with documents and workflow.
Xerox’s Ragnet points out that innovation most frequently follows failure. The lessons learned from failure are usually better remembered and lead to deeper insights.
But, how to apply that observation to services? Xerox’s approach to service innovation is to study current human behavior and real-world scenarios. When creating new services Xerox researches end users to discover how best to interact with them. Xerox calls this approach ‘ethnography’. But this sounds like the long-used approach to reaching out to customers via ‘focus groups’ or surveys. The problem is that most companies often don’t talk to customers and potential customers. They find it too convenient to skip the step when designing a new product or service of reaching out to potential customers.
The Xerox approach claims to be more agile than waterfall, iterating new ideas and progress with customers and getting their feedback. The steps of the Xerox ‘agile innovation pipeline’ include:
1. Research (Innovation)
2. Readiness
3. Productization
4. Integration
5. Operation
