Lean and Innovation

For many companies, lean is known to improve flow, quality and productivity, and we can listen to authorswho claim that Toyota is a quality and production driven company while European car manufacturers often are design driven.

The question is of course how to combine these two areas into a lean development system which will take care of continuous product improvements and productivity gains within the R&D process, along with an innovation process that works according to lean principles, but gives us the freedom to swim in blue oceans.

Asko tries to create this combination with a model based on an innovation funnel. The ope end of the funnel is Lean Innovation to take care of “big” creative innovations. The narrow part of the funnel is the production line of development projects. This development “line” has to be highly standardized and based on strict continuous small innovation improvements similar to a normal production line in production.

Asko´s model describes the differences in innovation and how you have to act between the open and the narrow part of the innovation funnel.