Agile Innovation Playbook

“Innovation done quicker, better, and cheaper. Innovation for the modern marketeer” Hugh Pile, CEO Blue Skies, ex L’Oreal CMO Western Europe


“Agile Innovation responds to ever-changing consumer and business needs. It is fast, flexible and focussed to maximise success.” Laura Sheard, Marketing and Innovation Director


Innovation in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) has been relatively unchanged over the last 40 years. Innovation has been a source of profitable growth for scores of companies worldwide. Innovation helps grow sales, profits, people’s capabilities, and shareholder value with a Return on Investment (ROI) of 185%.


However, CPG’s innovation model readily accepts an innovation failure rate of around 90%, with limited opportunities over the last 20 years to significantly improve that failure rate. No matter the company’s size, its innovation budget, and its experience, the failure rate exceeds the successes.


This failure represents a massive inefficiency in the innovation ecosystem as well as hindering successful innovation. It means, on average, for every successful product, it costs £41m and countless years lost.


Innovation needs to innovate. We need to not only find a better way to innovate but to do it cheaper and faster. Agile Innovation does that, and we want to share how you can do that too.


The Agile Innovation Playbook sets out the opportunities for innovation in a CPG company, the costs of innovation, and the current reasons for innovation failure. We define our Agile Innovation vision as zero per cent failure, then describe how your business would look and feel with that context, along with how to bring Agile Innovation into your organisation. Our last section helps implement Agile Innovation into your business, highlighting the tools you’ll need, your teams’ structure, and how to govern Agile Innovation.


The Agile Innovation Playbook is a practical book written to help all CPG and FMCG companies improve their innovation success. It offers you the tools to develop better products for consumers, bring more profit to retailers and manufacturers, enhance job satisfaction for employees, and improve shareholder value. It has resources available to help your company, no matter the size, to be agile in its new product development and produce new products that consumers demonstrably enjoy better than current products.