Five Little Known Facts about Integrating Improvement and Innovation
Both improvement and innovation have the same purposes and importance:
· Seeking to integrate organization objectives and functions
· Working to satisfy customers and increase competitive advantage
• They involve all employees within an organization to be apart from the management process and business process.
· Main shared goals:
o Continual improvement, achieving customer satisfaction
o Sustaining development, creating an open culture
Thus, the relationship between improvement and innovation can determine the organization’s performance and its development. In the new context of economics and business excellence, improvement and innovation became core elements in founding and increasing competitive advantage:
· Improvement and innovation have a vital role for business success
· Importance of the relationship between improvement practices and innovation methods
o Directly relates to the creating competitive business
o Strengthening organizational performance in the competitive market place
Fact 
We need more studies on improvement-innovation relationships
Fact 
Previous studies produced contradictions
Fact 
No conclusion recommending a specific improvement-innovation practice emerges
Fact 
Many questions emerge from existing literature:
· Do improvement practices have any impact on innovation in organizations?
· Which innovation is influenced more by improvement practices in organizations?
· Are there specific improvement practices that have more influence on innovation in organizations?
Fact 
As innovators we just need to get on with it:
· Use our innovation methods to find the best ways to integrate improvement and innovation.
· Use our technology to build an improvement-innovation systems based approach.
· Start with something simple such as integrating FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) into our improvement-innovation approach.
FMEA is straight forward and easy to use, yet it is a powerful quality improvement method that helps identify weak points and potential errors early in the conception phase of product and/or processes innovation. The FMEA technique provides a systematic; tools based approach for working in teams which can be used for identifying, preventing, eliminating or controlling of potential error causes in an improvement-innovation system and its associated problems.
Effective use of FMEA will eliminate or reduce things like:
· Project delays
· Changes in scope
· Failures
· Cancellation
The main reason for using FMEAs' during various stages of projects is to provide systematic failure free implementation and reduce project costs. Using such methods result in saving money and time. Efficiencies on this level are only possible by the prioritization of defects, based on reliable scientific data, so that corrective actions are taken for competent and efficient planning.
In a recent dialogue participants created the following word cloud (Wordle) based on their conversation:
Summary:
Integration of improvement and innovation provides a synergistic model to resolve the siloed approach currently being pursued in organizations. Such integration will lead to managing the organizational improvement-innovation systems systemically rather than managing them as parts of independent efforts. The improvement system uses already existing formal procedures and processes currently embedded in the organization and are subject to policies, procedures and audits, both internally and externally.
This approach provides:
- · Exploring the entire solution space to improve the quality of the innovation
- · Establishing measurable and auditable innovation which is subject to improvement
- · Ensuring that the innovation has necessary resources
- · Defining innovation efforts in terms of processes integrated into the process framework of the organization.
Stay tuned for the next blog which will present a potential framework for an improvement-innovation practice.
All the best,
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Chuck Roe| Academic Program Manager - Quality |
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e. CRoe@Post.edu |
Post University |
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President, Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies
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