Kaizen Teams = Innovation Teams

The common recommendation by TPS experts is that Kaizen teams must be cross-functional. The common rule is to form the team with 1/3 target area members, 1/3 from upstream and downstream areas, and 1/3 from external areas (i.e.: Finance, engineering, HR).

This makes sense, and sounds reasonable, however I found that perhaps the best way to explain the benefit of the cross-functional structure of the Kaizen team is to look into the ‘science’ of innovation. After all, Kaizen IS Innovation… albeit most people associate the latter, by default, with radical innovation (i.e.: iPODs, blackberrys, NASA, etc.). On the other hand, Kaizen (in 99% of the cases), is about incremental innovation, but the best practices for achieving incremental or radical innovation are the same.

Perhaps one of the best articles I’ve read about innovation was in the New Yorker (see this blog post), and clearly shows how great inventions come from the sharing of the right information at the right time. It goes into detail of how a company, Intellectual Ventures, was founded and how it became one of the greatest inventing organizations of our time. (IV, as it’s known for short, is 100% dedicated to the business of inventing, patenting, and licensing their inventions.) So how do they do it? While most organizations load up their R&D departments with engineers, doctors, chemists, and technical gurus, IV loads up with, lawyers, doctors, pilots, musicians, paleontologists, chemical engineers, programmers, teachers, and everyone you can think of, and launches brainstorming sessions to tackle myriads of problems. What they realized is that inventions seldom come from one individual and instead come from a set of circumstances that bring multiple experiences and information together in one place to help solve a problem.

That’s why a Kaizen team benefits from being cross-functional, and why the ‘thirds’ rule makes good sense. The more varied the experiences, the greater will be the chance to succeed with a solution.

So as I like to say… Nobody has the answer, but everybody has the answer.

(BTW, I googled this and couldn’t find anything similar, so perhaps I’m coining a new phrase here?)

Open Innovation: Corporate citizenship redefined.

One thing that I was taught when I was young was that sharing information with others and not keeping secrets could make you friends with a lot of people. In today’s market, it looks like major corporations are starting to leverage that axiom to further expand their corporate dominance.

Being a good corporate citizen no longer means charitable giving to local communities, and hiring interns from local schools. The definition has been transformed by some of the top corporate citizens to include direct participation from the community in identifying the next products, services and trends. In the case of IBM’s 2006 Innovation Jam, they allowed their corporate crème-de-la-crème to openly collaborate and share ideas with common citizens, and the result was an impressive 46,000 ideas from employees, family, friends, and partners, of which 10 were identified for further funding.

What has become clear is that cloud-based idea management platforms, which are configured for open innovation, are quickly becoming the tool of choice for these modern age corporate citizens to proactively engage their communities.

Making Senators "Stand in the circle"

I stumbled accross this video on Jon Miller's blog. Senate hopeful, Paul Akers, discusses Lean on Fox News. If there is one thing I'd like to see congress do is to pull a page from Taiichi Ohno's playbook.

Greennovation: The green innovation movement.

One of the greatest tech movements in history has been open-source software. At the birth of the movement many scoffed and thought that making source code available for free would lead to the financial demise of those who shared their code.

The following NY Times article explores how many companies (IBM, DuPont, and others) known for innovation are following suit with open innovation. They are opening virtual communities for discussion on ‘green’ topics. They are involving communities, and in the process pledging their environmental patents for common use. After all, many of these patents have to do with sustainability, and sharing them makes them more effective.