July 11, 2023 · 2 min read

Updated October 5, 2026

The New New Product Development Game

The 1986 Harvard Business Review article by Takeuchi and Nonaka that Ken Schwaber's 1995 paper cites as the source of Scrum's approach and its name.

I drafted this page with Claude from the HBR article and Schwaber's paper, then edited it myself. How I use AI.

Scrum is named after a rugby formation. The name traces back to a 1986 Harvard Business Review article: “The New New Product Development Game”, by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka.

What the article argued

Takeuchi and Nonaka studied how companies such as Fuji-Xerox, Canon, Honda, NEC and Hewlett-Packard developed new products. They saw two ways of working.

The first is a relay race. One group finishes its phase, then hands the baton to the next: concept, design, production. A problem at any handoff slows the whole thing down.

The second is rugby. A small, hand-picked, cross-functional team stays together from start to finish and moves the ball up the field as a unit, passing it back and forth. Phases overlap, and the team keeps experimenting even late in the work. One section of the article is headed “Moving the Scrum Downfield.”

They named six characteristics of the rugby approach: built-in instability, self-organizing teams, overlapping phases, “multilearning,” subtle control, and transfer of learning.

Where Scrum picks it up

Ken Schwaber’s paper, SCRUM Development Process, presented at OOPSLA in 1995, is an early description of Scrum for software development. It says this way of working was “first observed by Takeuchi and Nonaka” at those same companies. It goes on to say, “We call the approach the SCRUM methodology (see Takeuchi and Nonaka, 1986), after the SCRUM in rugby.”

So this article is the source Schwaber points to for the idea and for the name. Schwaber applied it to software. The article itself is about copiers, cameras, cars and printers.

Where I see the echoes

These are my parallels, not claims that Scrum was copied from the article:

• Relay race versus rugby is the same contrast as handing work from one function to the next versus one team delivering together.
• A hand-picked, cross-functional team with real day-to-day autonomy is what the Scrum Guide now calls a self-managing Scrum Team.
• Broad direction plus a challenging goal from management, with the team deciding how sounds a lot like a Product Goal.
• Experimenting and adjusting even late in the work is inspect and adapt.
• “Subtle control,” a few checkpoints in place of heavy gates, sounds a lot like Scrum’s events.

One caution worth keeping

The authors are honest about limits. Some teams in their study logged 60 to 100 hours of overtime a month at the peak, and they say the approach may not suit every kind of project. Reading the article is a good reminder that a team working as a unit is not the same as a team working itself to exhaustion.

What Next?

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