Timothy Schipper and Mark Swets
Summary: Innovative Lean Development brings the Lean Manufacturing principles of Toyota and others and applies them to innovation and the new product development process. People familiar with lean manufacturing may initially find moving from simplifying repeated processes to discovering new things challenging. This book shows that traditional lean concepts of gemba walk, process flow, waste, pitch value stream mapping, and takt time can be successfully applied to significantly reduce development time and risk.
InnovaSpec Recommendation: Innovative Lean Development provides lean tools to improve the innovation process. They are sufficiently explained so that an extensive experience in Lean Manufacturing is not required to understand or apply the tools to innovation. The focus on rapid learning cycles of 3-4 weeks to set a faster pace as opposed to relying on the stage-gate process is a key to quicker and reduced risk projects. Keeping multiple approaches open until a later design freeze may sound counter intuitive but is another key to lean innovation versus early “pick a winner” attempts to jump the process.