Product innovation with scrum: A longitudinal case study

This paper describes the innovation processes used in a partnership between a company that provides asset integrity and maintenance management consulting services in the energy sector and a university. The challenge faced by the company is to make their in-house expertise more readily available to a worldwide audience. A longitudinal embedded case study has been used to investigate how installable desktop software applications have been redesigned to create a new set of cloud hosted software services. The innovation team adapted an agile scrum process to include exploratory prototyping and manage the geographical distribution of the team members. A minimum viable product was developed that integrated functional elements of previous software tools into an end-to-end data collection, analysis and visualisation product called AimHi which uses a cloud-hosted web services approach. The paper illustrates how the scrum software development method was tailored for a product innovation context. Extended periods of evaluation and reflection (field trials), prototyping and requirement refinement were combined with periods of incremental feature development using sprints. The AimHi product emerged from a technology transfer and innovation project that has successfully reconciled conflicting demands from customers, universities, partner companies and project staff members.