Exploration and discussion concerning improvement and innovation in today's organizations.

In today’s highly competitive and global economy both 'improvement' and 'innovation' are essential for businesses to remain competitive. Generally, improvement aims for high and sustainable performance in existing business areas through continual and incremental gains, while innovation aims for breakthrough resulting in stepwise gains. In the past they were seen as mutually dependent and approached through the various 'silo' functional areas of organizations. Through benchmarking of best practices in use today there is strong evidence to support integrating improvement and innovation to achieve a coherent and powerful approach to sustainable business practices. Look for upcoming post to explore the dilemmas often faced in pursuing improvement and innovation concurrently and to sharing the benefits of successfully integrating them together.

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Using Creative Tension to Integrate Improvement & Innivation

Posted by on in Post University - TRIZ and Quality
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Using Creative Tension to Integrate Improvement and Innovation

The Challenge

As an educator and champion for both innovation and improvement, I recognize the tension between improvement and innovation many people express today. Peter Senge’s concept of Creative Tension (Senge, 1994) epitomizes this dilemma.

 

It involves formulating a coherent picture of the results people most desire to gain as individuals (the vision), alongside a realistic assessment of the current state of their lives today (the current reality).The challenge is to learn to expand our capacity to use improvement and innovation methods interactively when addressing projects and to avoid compartmentalizing them into mutually exclusive groups.

A Possible Solution

My vision is for an integrated set of methods and tools for improvement and innovation that people can use interchangeably for both improvement and innovation projects. The Current Reality is a fragmented set of tools, one for improvement and the other for innovation.

If we can step out of our traditional comfort zones and learn from best practices in use today, we can learn to integrate improvement and innovation practices to create powerful, unparalleled and sustainable business results.

I am not alone in this vision. The following “Word Cloud” shows prominence to words from a recent workshop on integrating improvement and innovation.

 b2ap3_thumbnail_Creative_Tension_Wordle.jpg

Google Search Trends

In a recent TRIZ conference, the Key Note Speaker, Larry Smith, a retired executive from Ford Motor Company, presented some interesting statistics on current trends from Google with respect to searches about improvement and innovation. In essence trends for use of TRIZ have declined in recent years while trends for use of Six Sigma have increased over the same time period.

 

b2ap3_thumbnail_Google_Trends_for_Improvement__Innovation_Searches.png

To see Mr. Smith’s entire presentation go to the Altshuller Institute’s Community of Practice: https://aitriz.org/groupjive

What’s Next?

Integrating improvement and innovation methods into an overall quality system seems like an approach that could eliminate the potential conflict between improvement and innovation methods. To be effective, we will need to manage improvement and innovation within the Quality Systems and use measures for improvement and innovation, as well as audit the use of both for appropriate use of resources.

In future blogs we will explore whether such a formal approach to innovation is possible. Stay tuned.

All the best,

Chuck Roe| Academic Program Manager - Quality

e. CRoe@Post.edu
w. 203.596.8580

Post University
800 Country Club
Waterbury, CT 06723
toll free 800.345.2562



Visit our blog @ blog.post.edu

President, Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies

Visit our blog @ https://aitriz.org/triz-quality

References

senge, p. (1994). strategies for developing personal mastery. the fifth discipline fieldbook (pp. 195-196). new york: doubleday.

Biography
I am the academic program manager for quality and a professor in the Malcolm Baldrige School of Business at Post University. I am also a PhD candidate in Human & Organizational Systems at Fielding Graduate University, and I have a Master of Science in Engineering Administration and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, both from the University of Tennessee. Currently I am also serving as the President for The Altshuller Institute for TRIZ Studies.
My work experience includes over 30 years as a quality professional, achieving multiple certifications in the areas of continuous improvement and innovation: Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Design for Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Organizational Climate Practitioner, and TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) Practitioner. I have also served as a judge for the Michigan Quality Award and an Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
Academic background includes being an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan, Dearborn campus, where I taught organizational learning and systems thinking; and at Indiana/Purdue’s Fort Wayne campus where I taught undergraduate statistics. I have also taught certification courses for the American Society for Quality Local Chapters for Reliability Engineering and Quality Engineering.
My philosophy of teaching has evolved from these years of experience in the corporate world and affiliations with institutions of higher education. Reflecting on my past experiences, there are three core beliefs that guide my teaching:
1. People have a built in desire to learn

2. People learn their whole lives
3. Responsibility for effective learning belongs equally to both student and teacher
My research and academic interest are focused on continual evolution of the Quality and Innovation disciplines and building core competencies in people and organizations for continual improvement, creativity, and innovation.
On a personal note, I enjoy photography, golf, fly fishing and gardening. I currently live in Plymouth, Michigan with my wife Jo Ellen. We have three daughters with their respective partners and six grandchildren, two boys and four girls. We also are maintaining a home in the Waterbury, CT area, at Post University, as well as our home in Michigan.

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