Are Scrum & Innovation incompatible ?The opinion of a team member

The following article is based on my own personal experience and may, consequently, be different from other developers. My intent here is to share my answers to questions that a new Scrum team member may ask himself on how innovation can be promoted in a Scrum environment

What is innovation for a researcher?

Coming to the business world after a PhD thesis, innovation had no meaning for me. My main purpose was invention and not innovation. Many articles explain the differences between these two concepts but to keep it simple, for me, innovation implies industrializing an invention (or at least an idea) to satisfy the needs and expectations of customers. During my PhD thesis I had no customer and my goal was simply to solve a problem. I would not take costs into account for instance. Starting to work in the IT industry and in a Scrum framework environment, a simple question was bothering me:

Are SCRUM and Innovation incompatible?

After several months of feature development in Scrum framework, I made the following observation: as the Product Owner (PO) was collecting customers’ needs to build his backlog and team members were answering those needs according to his priorities, there was almost no room for inventions.
It was very frustrating for me to think, although it was only a belief, that a team member had no space to express his creativity outside of the PO’s story definition.
Then I tried to better understand Scrum and it hit me that:

• As a Scrum team member, I was allowed to add a story to the backlog in order for the PO to decide of its priority. This way my ideas/inventions could be transformed into innovations.
• As long as other Scrum team members agree, I was able to take some time during each sprint to work on new ideas.

Those two points fulfilled my expectations in terms of innovation and as interestingly, generated new insights. Indeed, customers and Scrum team members are not the only ones that could provide innovative ideas. For example, in our company, seeing that some innovations can emerge outside of the PO’s original backlog, the documentation team suggested some improvements in our framework which are now widely used by all Scrum teams.

So it is compatible but could we go a step further?

This year, we wondered if we could go a step further, not only at the Scrum team level, but at the whole R&D level (more than ten teams). To do so, we organized a day and a half long event dedicated to innovation. We asked Scrum team members — more than eighty people — to suggest ideas that could be discussed and addressed during a hackathon session dedicated to innovation. Another session of hackathon was organized simultaneously to address security issues but this point could be detailed in another article.

Getting back to the innovation session, thirteen projects were organized by more than thirty developers! For a first shot, we can say that this hackathon answered a need expressed by more than 40% of the whole department.

Innovation for Innovation?

A frequent question is: Are we innovating just for the sake of it?
In other words: Is innovation just a time sink to keep developers happy with no relation to customers needs?
Examples of agile companies that are using hackathons to generate innovative ideas tend to prove that it is not a waste of time for a R&D department as a whole. It is too early for us to reach this kind of conclusion but we acted to be sure to get a win-win deal: rewarding the hackathon’s teams results according to our corporate values (https://www.esker.com/careers/our-philosophy/). There were specific juries for each category depending on what we decided to value:

• “The most federative” for the value “One team beyond boundaries”
• “The most respectful and trustful” for the value “More attitude, less gratitude”
• “The most innovative” for the value “Dare to innovate, initiate and iterate”
• “The most wanted” for the value “All actions toward satisfaction”
• “The show must go on” for the value “Good vibes only”

Those prizes were awarded during our company quarterly meeting to reinforce their significance.

And from your point of view?

Now that you have a better idea of my experience of innovation in Scrum, how it can be managed at the whole R&D level and empower every Scrum team member, can you think of other ways to help innovation and Scrum coexist?