The Agile Approach was developed in the software industry, but can be applied successfully to many other areas of business, particularly those areas which may be complex, where requirements sometimes change, and where customer collaboration is needed. Put simply, when your product is built to satisfy the customers needs, rather than a fixed design (a Ford car, for example), then agile works.

Products that are planned and designed to be sold as-is (or maybe with limited options) generally follow the Waterfall process, where a product and its market are researched, a design is produced and tweaked, followed by taking that product to market and, hopefully, selling plenty if you got your product and pricing strategy right. This way of doing things doesn't work very well with creative products and services, where more flexibility, interaction, and complexity are involved.

Some of the tools and processes used may still be fairly straightforward, but the overall approach uses those in a way that delivers customer satisfaction by delivering elements of a project on time, rather than trying to build a FINAL result all at once. Because we all know that markets and requirements can change rapidly, leaving projects that have been planned in the old way struggling to adapt.