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…
Following on from the discussion of Innovation vs. Efficiency, the following links are also interesting: The article in Business WeekAn article from Six Sigma CompaniesAn article on Innovation ForumAn article on Innovating To WinAn article from Cognitive EdgeA short post with some good discussion at mnspeak
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The blog Knowledge Jolt with Jack recently posted on potential conflict between innovation vs. efficiency. Jack cites the example of the recent experience of the highly innovative 3M company, following CEO turnover. At 3M, the latest CEO is now rolling back the process efficiency initiatives introduced by the previous CEO. As the new CEO notes,…
Previously, I talked about Lean Six Sigma, Kaizen and Idea Management systems, but I didn’t talk to a great extent about idea management in Kaizen. First some words about the history of Kaizen. In the Second World War, young US men who might otherwise have been employed in factories went off to fight in the…
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In a January 2007 paper “Driving Operational Innovation Using Lean Six Sigma,” the IBM Institute for Business Value argued that Lean Six Sigma can do more than help achieve operational excellence through improving processes: Lean Six Sigma can . . . help leaders discover innovation opportunities far beyond operations, enhance financial performance, and create organizations…