Agile project management techniques have become commonplace in many organizations. We experimentally examine how these techniques affect performance in two innovation settings: (1) a design setting and (2) a search setting. Our results caution against uniform adoption of the Agile approach, and suggest that the choice of the approach should depend on the nature of the project and on the risk appetite of the project manager.

We study multiple parallel innovation contests where contest organizers elicit solutions to a set of problems from solvers. Prior theoretical work shows that if problem solution requires less novelty then organizers should restrict participation with one contest. We experimentally show that this may not hold true in practice due to the heterogenity of solver efforts and encouraging solvers to participate in multiple contests can yield a larger organizer profit even for less novel problems.