[Photo courtesy of tomasz przechlewski on Flickr, per Creative Commons 2.0 license]
3. Scrum and sprint.
The historical business models of how projects and innovation get done are very sequential. You do stage one, then you do stage two, then you do stage three, stage four, etc. Kulkarni has a different execution model that he calls “scrum and sprint.” Scrum and sprint is a Rugby term.
The key is, you bring your development team together and decide what to do by charting a list and giving the team a short goal and you run to making that short goal.
Think about how to make that work in your model. You take all functions that need to work on a project—manufacturing, commercial, labs, customers, intermediates, whoever—and come together for a brief period of time. That can be daily, weekly or monthly. It doesn’t matter how often you come together as long as it makes sense for the project. But everybody agrees on a goal, maybe something you want to accomplish over the next four days or next week, and everybody works together to make that happen.
This is also called a waterfall, Kulkarni says. It is actually a model for risk management.
So try out these three tips and watch your innovation accelerate.