Summary and thoughts on The New New Product Development Game as an inspiration for Scrum

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The New New Product Development Game, by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, was/is referenced a lot by the Scrum community as a primary inspiration.

6 characteristics from some Japanese new product development companies from the mid-1970s to early 1980s

Effective new product development from a handful of Japanese companies (Fuji-Xerox, Canon, Honda, NEC) in the mid-1970s to early 1980s seemed to share six characteristics:

1. “Built-in instability”: broad, challenging goals and a wide measure of freedom to accomplish them;
2. “Self-organizing project teams”: autonomous, motivated, cross-functional teams;
3. “Overlapping development phases”;
4. “Multilearning”: learning at multiple levels (individual, group, company) and across multiple functions;
5. “Subtle control”: deliberate design of systems to encourage desired behaviour (e.g., who’s selected for teams, work environment, encouraging direct engagement with customers, team-based evaluation and reward, celebrating failures, etc.);
6. “Organizational transfer of learning”: Mechanisms for learning from one group to transfer to the rest of the organisation.