A Hybrid Innovation Management Framework for Manufacturing – Enablers for more Agility in Plants

While facing a mounting product and manufacturing complexity, admiration arouses among established manufacturers for the agility of emerging market entrees, serving a highly dynamic and individualized market with innovative customer oriented products and processes. Balancing innovative dynamism and the mitigation of risk constitutes a key success factor: today’s manufacturers must become innovation masters in an ever-changing, change-adaptive environment. Thus, building a framework for the refurbishing of proven Stage-Gate based innovation process models, by integrating Agile Project Management (APM) methods, constitutes the goal of this paper. Building upon a specification of the holistic concept Manufacturing Innovation Management (MIM), which constitutes a general perspective on innovation management in a manufacturing context, an extensive literature review on conventional innovation process models, agile frameworks and recent hybrid advancements and semi-structured expert interviews have contributed to a conceptual Hybrid Innovation Management Framework , depicting enablers for a successful Scrum integration to enhance agility in manufacturing departments and production plants.