Carsten Deckert
Let us now turn to incremental innovations or to innovations which derive from creativity with a “small c”, as Goleman put it. The methods of incremental innovations have their origin in the Toyota Production System which developed from the pressure of the difficult market conditions for the Japanese automotive industry at the end of the Second World War. Out of this pressure the Toyotamanagers Eiji Toyoda and Taichi Ohno made a “benchmarking-trip” to the USA to study the Ford Production System. Especially the employee suggestion system of the Ford Motor Company and the business principle of American supermarkets were adapted and consistently realized by Toyota. The spread of the system in the automotive industry of the West began in 1990 with the publication of the MIT-survey “The machine that changed the world” by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos, in which the term “Lean Production” was used for the first time. This term is often misunderstood: It does not mean slimming of hierarchies, but slimming of business processes. This slimming craze concerning hierarchies transforms the company into an undernourished organization which is all skin and bones. Meanwhile the term “lean” is used with all kinds of nouns, amongst others such illustrious constructions such as “Lean Thinking”, “Lean Six Sigma” or even “Lean Innovation”. Out of the motivation to avoid wastefulness arose the principles of continuous improvement which is one of the cornerstones of the Toyota Production System: There is nothing which cannot be improved. This finally resulted in the Japanese management tool Kaizen (Japanese for “Change to the better”) which is known in English-speaking countries as “Continuous Improvement Process” (CIP). Here the motto goes: “He who does not have a problem has a problem.” The method CIP can be illustrated by the CIP-wheel. The wheel symbolizes the continuous improvement which forges ahead uphill on an inclined plane. So things are looking up. The drive mechanism of the wheel is the transparency of the business processes. Stumbling blocks on the way up are various forms of wastefulness. Standardization is the wedge which is put under the wheel so that it will not roll downhill again. There are two basic strategies to prevent continuous improvement to happen which affect different parts of the wheel:
Putting stumbling blocks in the way The basic idea of this approach is to make the wastefulness big so that continuous improvement is of no use. Metaphorically speaking you put piles of wastefulness in front of the wheel which are so big that the CIP-wheel cannot get under way. There are many starting points for this; Eiji Toyoda distinguished 47