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2017 The Secret To Organizational Innovation - The Startup - Medium
2017 The Secret To Organizational Innovation - The Startup - Medium
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Matthew E. May Follow
Humble strategist helping organizationsprintand
again.
individuals change, grow, and win. Passion for
ideation, facilitation, and the written word. https://matthewemay.com
Dec 3, 2017 · 5 min read
Most people are familiar with the name Toyota. Most business people
are familiar with (or at least not completely ignorant of) the vaunted
Toyota Production System (TPS), a much-studied manufacturing
approach. Having served as a fully retained advisor to Toyota for over 8
years, I have particular point of view on that system, and, more
importantly, why it matters when it comes to a discussion of
innovation.
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I recently asked over 100 CEOs what their greatest challenges, issues,
and pain points were when it came to innovation in their organization,
irrespective of how they de ned innovation. The responses produced
the same sort of gauntlet as the one faced by 1950s manufacturing
executives. It just had di erent issues: lack of capability, resourcing,
risk, getting started, incrementalism, creativity, fear of failure,
executive buy-in, focus, return on investment, alignment, con dence,
bureaucracy.
Like production issues, you could easily pick o a single challenge and
meet it, but collectively? A elegant solution — a system — is required.
Conceptually — in full awareness that all models are wrong but some
are useful — the SIS can be thought of as three major gears, constantly
moving and feeding both forward and back. Visually it looks like this:
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I’ve pressure-tested this system in the wild with a few select client
companies. What makes it work is to think about it just as you would
enterprise software: a robust set of eld-tested, integrated tools and
methods — each of the tri-part gears plays host to a powerful but user
friendly toolkit — with complete installation and training to help
manage the change, supported by an innovation center of excellence.
If this is of interest to you, please let me know so that I might keep you
informed of progress toward public availability.
matthew.may@me.com
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