-
The Lean Startup
That the lean philosophy can be applied much more widely than manufacturing, if done so intelligently, should perhaps come as no surprise to readers of this blog. Recently, I’ve been learning more about one particular re-invention: the lean startup. The ideas have a clear heritage through lean and agile and, of course, place the customer…
-
Innovationskraft
Yesterday, I was one of around 120 attendees at a half-day innovation conference in Gothenburg termed Innovationskraft. A surprisingly wide range of people were represented, including leaders from manufacturing and automotive industry, academics, lawyers, consultants and at least one behavioural scientist. And the meeting was free! The theme for the day was structured innovation. We got…
-
The Mastery of Innovation
Today’s post is a little different as it’s inspired by a book, and I have to give away before we start that I like The Mastery of Innovation – a Field Guide to Lean Product Development by Katherine Radeka. This is story about how innovation can be enhanced and enabled by using Lean principles, so…
-
Make your calendar from Lego
For many global businesses, the benefits of a tactile visual planning often have to be eschewed in favour of sharing plans electronically. Electronic plans, of course, feel more modern and make it easier to share between geographically remote sites and with co-workers who travel, but you lose some of the realness of physical boards. Engadget…
-
Improving healthcare with lean
Maybe because I have a background in pharmaceutical research, I’m always particularly interested to come across examples where Lean has been used outside of the more “traditional” production environments. There’s a short article on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network entitled How we revolutionized our Emergency Department; certainly an eye-catching title. The article describes what…
-
Inertia
Much of what we do as Lean and continuous improvement practitioners is related to change management: there must be some change in the way work is done or we have made no difference. With this in mind, I was struck by a piece on World Service a couple of weeks ago in the program Health…