Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity

12 Optimizing Your Infrastructure

If you maximize the potential that people in an organization can and will communicate, you will vastly increase the likelihood of knowledge transfer, and hence innovation.

—Thomas Allen and Gunter Henn¹

Your attitude, knowledge, and leadership skills are vitally important to success at innovation, and to nurturing and developing the innovation culture within your organization. So, too, are the business processes you implement to enable and support innovation, including Agile scrums for speed, portfolio management for risk mitigation, and the three innovation roles to nurture engagement.

For the innovation effort to reach its full potential, the right infrastructure, systems, and tools are also required, for they are essential enablers and catalysts. Because the performance advantage can be significant, it is an Agile Innovation leader's responsibility to design and implement the needed infrastructure. This chapter focuses on the key elements.

Four Elements of Infrastructure

The necessary infrastructure consists of four major elements:

• The virtual infrastructure: software tools for ideation, portfolio management, and workflow management.
• Facilitation and collaboration: the best ways of working together.
• The physical infrastructure: the work environment for innovation.
• Open innovation: the methods of engaging people from outside the organization ...