All Features
Matthew E. May
I get the question all the time, especially from organizations that have significant investment in some process improvement program—like a lean Six Sigma or lean kaizen initiative. (I hear the ghosts of Toyota engineers booing.) These companies have picked all the low-hanging fruit, squeezed as…
Bruce Hamilton
Last week marked the 100th anniversary of the introduction of a moving assembly line at Henry Ford’s Highland assembly plant, an innovation that inaugurated mass production.
Ford was not the first to build cars in an assembly line. Ransom Olds did that first in 1902, and Ford copied him. And,…
MIT News
The U.S. economy retains myriad sources of innovative capacity—but not enough of the innovations occurring in America today reach the marketplace, according to a major two-year MIT study.
The report, by MIT’s commission on Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE), found that potentially…
NIST
The manufacturing workforce—so critical to manufacturing innovation—is the basic, yet decisive, building block for successfully implementing next-generation strategies. If manufacturers are to engineer innovation in their businesses, workforce-development investments must evolve from a one-off…
MIT News
You may have seen little squares of Tcho chocolate in their brightly colored wrappers decorated with futuristic parabolas of gold and silver. They’re easily found: Starbucks has sold them; Whole Foods sells them now.
Those usually aren’t the stores you visit to track down handcrafted chocolate…
Akhilesh Gulati
Editor’s note: This article continues the series exploring structured innovation using the TRIZ methodology, a problem-solving, analysis, and forecasting tool derived from studying patterns of invention found in global patent data.
As the executive council got down to business for the day,…
MIT News
Prizes have long been used to induce solutions to national challenges. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, prizes yielded vaccine inoculation, lifeboats, a method of calculating longitude at sea, new food-preservation techniques, and more. But by the late 19th century, prizes had largely been…
NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced nearly $2 million in Phase I and Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards to 12 U.S. businesses. These awards provide funding to help companies develop technologies that could lead to commercial and public…
Knowledge at Wharton
It was 2003, exactly 56 years after Ole Kirk Christiansen bought the first plastic injection molding machine in Denmark to start manufacturing plastic bricks for building-block toys. On the surface, or so it seemed, the LEGO Group had done everything right over that time period.
The company was an…
MIT News
Not long ago, MIT political scientist Suzanne Berger was visiting a factory in western Massachusetts, a place that produces the plastic jugs you find in grocery stores. As she saw on the factory floor, the company has developed an innovative automation system that has increased its business:…
Knowledge at Wharton
Innovation is a tough word to define, but most would say they know it when they see it. At a recent Wharton Women in Business conference, participants were asked to discuss their personal definitions of the term and give a concrete example from their own experiences. Here is a look at what they…
Stewart Anderson
Few would argue with the proposition that a firm’s well-being depends upon its ability to innovate. Firms that lack the capacity to develop new and improved offerings which satisfy customer needs, together with improved means for realizing and providing those offerings, are not likely to remain…
Akhilesh Gulati
Cooking is not my forte, but I try. I intended my latest concoction to be interesting, new, and easy. It was a soup, made with nontraditional ingredients, and it won rave reviews at a neighborhood potluck. No one could guess all the ingredients, so it won the “unique” dish award. When asked…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
“What makes a personal kanban any better than a to-do list?” asked Julie, crossing out a completed task on her “ta da!” list with exaggerated strokes.
“With personal kanban you visualize your work, it becomes tangible, you get kinesthetic feedback, it’s flexible, contextual, and it promotes…
