The USA Today described Doug Hall as “part clown, part genius”. Everyone describes him as the leading expert on the topic of innovation, and he runs a place called Eureka Ranch near Cincinnati where his innovation work takes place. Innovation, of course, is the hot buzzword these days. Every company claims to be doing it, the business consultants have suddenly become experts in it, and every new product is now an ‘innovation’. Not all innovations are the same, however.
If you look at Hall’s web site, he offers two services: the fastest way to innovate and the smartest way to innovate. In the first one, he and his team will think of the innovation for you. In the second instance, they’ll teach you how to innovate. It’s the old ‘give a man a fish, feed him once; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime’ adage. Too many companies don’t know the difference between the two.
In the lean world, there are very close parallels. There are kaizen events and six sigma projects, and then there are lean transformations. The first is a one shot deal - big effort to dive into some area and make a great big change. The second is an ongoing change mechanism. Give the plant a fish or teach it to fish - the choice is management’s.
The problem with having Doug Hall think of your next great product, making an improvement through a kaizen event, or having someone give you a fish is that the value starts to deteriorate the second you have the product, improvement or the fish. In the case of a Eureka Ranch innovation, every product has its life cycle. Competition heats up, technology changes, the world moves on. When that third party innovation has run its course, the company is right back where it started from. There is nothing permanent or sustainable to it.
The same is true of the kaizen event. The event concludes, the process is improved, then everyone goes back to work, but the world moves on, products and processes change with demand and technology. New customers come along with new demands. The improved process slowly drifts away from being the best as the environment around it changes. It will take another kaizen event some day to recalibrate it.
The point is that there is one time innovation, and there is an innovation to the process. A company cannot achieve long term success through the one time approach. The fundamental question is why the company did not develop the innovative product on its own? What is wrong with its new product development process that caused it to fail - and need Doug Hall to fix it. Having Doug Hall do its work and come up with the new product does not address that fundamental question. The solution is to use Doug Hall to install an ongoing internal process for innovation.
Lean is the same way. The big question is not how do we solve the problem - it is how do we fix the process so that the problem cannot occur again. The objective of lean is the development and implementation of management processes that are driven to continuously bring problems to the surface and solve them - to continuously improve. That cannot be achieved through projects.
The future does no belong to those who rely on inventions or improvement events. It belongs to those with superior processes.
