Secrets of innovative lean six-sigma

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows how sick I am when I hear that innovation and six-sigma can’t be mutually beneficial. This is simply not true.

I firmly believe that six-sigma provides a solid foundation for innovation.

The diagram below shows that:

There are several general categories of new products. Some are new to the market (ex. DVD players into the home movie market), some are new to the company (ex. Game consoles for Sony), some are completely novel and create totally new markets (ex. the airline industry). When viewed against a different criteria, some new product concepts are merely minor modifications of existing products while some are completely innovative to the company.

In my experience true innovation is rare. Most products are not “completely new”, so require stable, capable processes (which may already be in existence in the organization). Nevertheless Business Week reports that:

“You cannot create in that atmosphere of confinement or sameness. Perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company—it’s one of the dangers of Six Sigma—is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M.”

Here are some more reasons why lean / six-sigma and innovation mix like oil and water:

1. Vapid creativity. The quest at the heart of six-sigma to control variability necessarily curtails aberrations which, by the way, are exactly what creative ideas look like.
2. Customer negligence. In the rush to reap lean benefits, the customer is often forgotten. Most companies equate lean to cost savings, and as lean thinking permeates the organization resources and attention increasingly focus inwardly.

The secrets for success [link to pdf]:

1. Recognize that all aspects of your business require some license for creativity and experimentation.
2. Protect processes highly dependent on variability and creativity.
3. Tie all activities back to the customer.
4. Remember that quantum leaps in meeting customer needs can initially look like foreign objects threatening a smooth system.
5. Collaborate to bring in more innovation or more process orientation, depending on your need.

I would also add that innovation can only take place when you can predict what existing processes will be, else you are building innovation on a foundation of sand.

Six-sigma helps to measure the repeatability of a process, and generally does not for create the process itself.

There isn’t any reason why an organization can’t be creative and then employ methods like six-sigma.

image credits 1, 2