Innovation culture is not a fancy hub

As companies follow their Agile transformation journey, they pass many phases. It can range from guerrilla IT agile endeavour, to unified company strategy and priorities, vendor and ecosystem partnership or learning organization. Some also face the need of being innovative. Many innovation efforts usually start with common anti-patterns urging the employees “to be innovative” and “to show the business case” for their ideas. Many of these efforts end with annoyed people and wasted money. But not every company need to be innovative. Some are successful followers, some are able to deliver services for lower cost.

Those who need or want to be innovative, need to realise that building innovative culture is quite the same as building the agile one. It is not about fancy innovation hubs, urging overloaded employees to bring ideas or labelling existing projects as startups. It is rather the long-term cultural change, management accepting the failures, granted time for people to experiment, formal processes and techniques of gathering, evaluating and piloting ideas, and of course, it is the personal mindset change.

In this talk, we’ll focus on typical innovation scenarios, pattern and anti-patterns and provide potential steps you can take in your context.

Jaroslav Procházka

Agile coach and innovation mentor

Working 15 years in IT, telco and financial industry in various IT development and leading roles I spent past 11 years as Agile and Innovation coach applying Lean, Agile and innovation thinking and practices. My favourite tools are innovation and Kaizen workshops and (Agile, Lean, ITIL) games, because people find their “aha” moments by themselves.

I guide companies in their internal innovations effort (internal startups), co-founded startup incubator focused on services, as well as a few startups (e.g. QuickJOBS, and brand new SimplyIT.cloud). I like to share experience via blog posts, books and ebooks and time to time also speak at international conferences.