It’s the natural order of economics that when an opportunity becomes available, everything rushes in to fill the vacuum. As the market becomes crowded, various offerings must differentiate themselves from the others to demonstrate value. So it’s almost inevitable that innovation will grow to become an amorphous blob of ideas, techniques, processes, “experts,” software, and a host of other things.

I was thinking about this when I saw a new software application touted for its ability to help clients with “agile lean innovation.” Agile is a word adopted from software development, which is really just about stripping away a slow, steady development process and replacing it with short “sprints” to complete a few features at a time. Lean is about stripping away unnecessary assets to focus on doing the most with the least. In case you haven’t been around innovation very long, few innovation activities have much funding and staff. Most are already lean, but not intentionally. And most are already sprints, because the people involved have other jobs they need to get back to. So the software purports to assist innovators in what they already do.

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