Transitioning from a waterfall to an agile thinking can be very hard, and there’s nothing harder for some people than to understand how innovation works at an agile shop.
Receiving feedback from your customers on a feature you’re working on because they asked you too is usually easily understood, but what about Research & Development?
The answer to that is pretty simple: get your customers on board!
Talk to a few of them, the most involved ones, new customers even, and see if your idea for the next feature could help them. Your customers shouldn’t always be the ones asking you to implement a new feature or solve a problem they have.
The next question, harder to answer to, is: “what is then the priority between regular work and innovation work?”
I think there shouldn’t be a priority between the two, because if you get your customers on board with your innovation work, it’ll become regular work. The business value of R&D will get higher because now the people paying for your product want the new feature you’re talking to them about.