Lean Idea Management: Balancing the idea assembly line.

People have asked me in the past year what Lean Idea Management meant. They assumed it had to do with managing Kaizen in lean organizations. Although in reality our Idea Management tool would bring value to Lean organizations, it also applies well in all organizations. The reason I named the blog Lean Idea Management, and really what drove the design of EurekaTool was the need to eliminate the non-value added steps often associated with that assembly line called “ideation-to-implementation”. There are many areas of waste in a typical continuous...

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Managing ideas that save lives - Can you afford not to do it effectively?

If there is anything to learn from the Toyota accelerator fiasco is that there is a vast disconnect in the reporting systems that currently exist in organizations to stay abreast of safety situations which could be deemed ‘catastrophic’ (loss of life impact). Part of the reason that Toyota did not address the accelerator problem more decisively was the fact that the external sensors (data collection points) that they were utilizing were not well integrated and collected a lot of erroneous or misleading data. NHTSA was perhaps one of the biggest...

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Innovation is about adding value.

I am guilty of making the same mistake many make about innovation – believing it’s usually about state-of-the-art inventions. I recently blogged about the Apple iPAD and did a good job of criticizing the lack of new technology. After all, the iPAD is essentially something between a large iPhone or a small laptop that most companies will be able...

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