Where has the innovation gone?

I believe that Agile helps to enable innovation and provides a base for making it happen.

"Clients want to keep going forward even when they know full well the solution isn't right."

If you're holding daily standups and identifying impediments such as "this isn't going to actually work" then you can quickly stop working on it and let the client know. Your velocity might go down for a sprint, however you'll stop going down the wrong path.

"It takes a brave soul to say: 'This isn't working. Let's go back to the drawing board!'"

That's true, and is why honesty must be encouraged.

From what Naresh is saying it appears that people are being too rigid in their application of Agile. Sometimes you gotta spike it. Allowing for it needs to be part of the rules.

Two quibbles...
1. "we're seeing the same old stuff" may mean more that we're maturing as a profession than anything to do with Agile. Isn't the argument for Design Patterns that we should not be re-inventing the wheel all the time?

2. There seems to be a mix up between 'innovation' and 'coding cleanly' here. Max Choong's comments have nothing to do with Agile in my experience. I've seen plenty of non-Agile projects suffering the same thing. I would go so far as to say that Agile gives you more opportunity to break with the sins of the past as you should be working iteratively. In a waterfall environment, you are usually committed to a course for an extended period of time and trying to change midflight when reality is showing you that plan 1 isn't working is much harder in such an environment. In either case, someone needs to step up to say "stop that", but you take on less risk in an iterative environment for doing so. You've delivered something working, so taking a bit longer for an update is much more palatable.

Let's also be clear on what Agile should mean... it means product is more important than process. If your project is going down in flames because "agile isn't flexible enough" then you aren't agile. Do what makes sense for YOU for heaven's sake!

Let's face it, most businesses aren't even caught up on current trends and technology. With everything available, what's the overriding need for something new when most of us are just trying to turn out a new HR app, or some search app that has more "cool" in it. Even Google, though I can't speak as an insider and definitely could be wrong, at least the view from outside is that their innovations aren't derived from their planned projects, rather from that "20% time", which they harvest the best from and turn into great new things.

To keep up with the trend or to be pressured to nake innovations, you never have sacrifice quality to just mask what is really ugly underneath... Even if a process seem to be left behind, what's important is that it never keeps up with something impossible for now.

Sometimes it is important to be able to kill off an project that should never have been started. It is best to kill it off the idea when it springs to life, but given politics it can be impossible. Agile can give small life to these kind of projects. Maybe that is the problem really?