The CEO of Toyota, Katsuaki Watanabe, was recently interviewed and written up in an article in the Wall Street Journal . Watanabe was also recently interviewed in the July-August edition of the Harvard Business Review. In the interviews, Watanabe talks about radical innovation: he describes the idea of building a dream car that cleans the environment, prevents accidents, can travel the world on a single tank of gas, and of course is cheap and high quality.
Watanabe’s talk of innovation – and his use of the Japanese word Kakushin for it – has triggered some discussion on the blogosphere. In particular, there has been interest regarding the relationship of Kaizen (continuous improvement) to Kakushin (innovation) and Kaikaku (revolutionary change). See for example here and here.
In his book Kaizen, Imai described innovation as more of a Western approach. Japanese innovation is often described in terms of Kaizen only, so it is interesting to see radical, breakthrough innovation described from the Japanese perspective by the company that made Kaizen famous.
When I was 18 I won a scholarship from Toyota, and had a chance to visit their plant in Kentucky. I was so impressed with their systems of Kaizen. I think their way of managing workers continues to be innovative, if not solely for the reason that they value ideas from everybody, especially the shift workers. Toyota has always seen that ideas have value, and rewarded good ideas according to the profit it made the company. If some companies would just apply kaizen "continuously improving" to their management they would experience innovation in their products and processes.
I think Japan is catching on to the disruptive innovation movement, and I can see that new disruptive products will be produced very soon, as long as the CEOs are willing to take the risk.