The study is motivated by the aspiration to understand project governance in organizations pursuing the development of new products and services across multiple knowledge worker teams. In particular, the following problem statement guides the study: Is governance of innovation project management necessary or neglected?

Taking the example of agile teams, I illustrate how the advancements in team based project management approaches force us to rethink governance of innovation project management. The findings are based on eight studies. The data consists of results from a total of 53 knowledge worker teams across 44 organizations in 8 countries, viz. about 3800 minutes of recorded material enriched by four quantitative surveys and many hours of observations.

The two main conclusions drawn from this study are: (1) fundamentally different approaches to governance of innovation projects are a prerequisite for a success of projects developing new products and services, and (2) governance, particularly in heavily top-down influenced fields such as public administration, will benefit from advancements in agile project management methods.