Common causes of failure within the innovation process in most organisations can be distilled into five types:

1. Poor goal definition
2. Poor alignment of actions to goals
3. Poor participation in teams
4. Poor monitoring of results
5. Poor communication and access to information

Guess what Six Sigma is good at? … and I’m not even a consultant!

Common causes of failure within the innovation process in most organisations can be distilled into five types:

1. Poor goal definition
2. Poor alignment of actions to goals
3. Poor participation in teams
4. Poor monitoring of results
5. Poor communication and access to information

Guess what Six Sigma is good at? … and I'm not even a consultant!

I may be completely missing something but is there not a fundamental difference between the way we view and manage production and R&D? Innovation is generally an off-line activity. It has failure built into it, it even relies on failure to work properly so (DURR) defect reduction techniques in general may be at odds with at least the early (light bulb) stages of this process. Production on the other hand is quite different (you would hope) with the tolerance and consequence of variation and failure quite different, so maybe different techniques??? Do I need to go for a lie down???

I know, I should be a consultant …

I may be completely missing something but is there not a fundamental difference between the way we view and manage production and R&D? Innovation is generally an off-line activity. It has failure built into it, it even relies on failure to work properly so (DURR) defect reduction techniques in general may be at odds with at least the early (light bulb) stages of this process. Production on the other hand is quite different (you would hope) with the tolerance and consequence of variation and failure quite different, so maybe different techniques??? Do I need to go for a lie down???

I know, I should be a consultant …