20 Tips For LEAN Design Innovation

Thank you for your interest in the rapidly growing field of LEAN Design Innovation! The tips you see in this booklet have been developed from my 30+ years of experience work-ing with Global LEAN Leaders.

The importance of LEAN during the design phase of a product or process is being rapdily realized as the main contributor to a projects success. Indeed, 80% of downstream waste may be prevented by applying my LEAN methodology to the design phase.

The Huthwaite Innovation Institute’s LEAN Design methodol-ogy allows you to:

• Accelerate your team’s innovation engine to make it faste and more productive.

• Apply an architecture for making innovation understand-able, doable and repeatable.

• The LEAN Design InnovationCUBE takes the “fuzziness” out of innovation.

• Measure which of your ideas are best and why.

• Tap you into a pipeline of new techniques through your ac-cess to the FREE material available at barthuthwaite.com.

For more insights, please visit www.barthuthwaite.com or con-tact me directly at bart@barthuthwaite.com. Best of success!

Bart Huthwaite, Sr.Founder, Huthwaite Innovation Institute Mackinac Island, Michigan

i

20 Tips For LEAN Design Innovation

byBart Huthwaite and The Huthwaite Innovation Institute

TIP #1

Involve all Stakeholders

Stakeholders include anyone who may have an impact on your projects success. Involve all of those who must implement your project right from the start. They will understand the problem, “own” the project, and help you deliver solutions later.

Remember: A stakeholder who is not part of the solu-tion can later become part of the problem.

TIP #2

Climb Your Mountain BackwardsInnovation requires reverse thinking. This is opposite to the way we normally think. We most often use deductive thinking, starting from the current state and moving for-ward. We look at the resources presently available and think only within our means.

Innovative thinking reverses this. You start with your end-in-view goal and bring that future to the present. Working backwards helps you to find new paths outside the ruts of your experience.

Innovation thinking is not the conventional “cause-to-effect.” It is “effect-to-cause”. You imagine the mountain top you want to reach and then work backwards to find the best way.

TIP #3

Search for Green Bananas

You must spot new opportunities while they are still “green bananas” These are unmet wants that have yet to ripen. Green bananas are opportunities the marketplace may not even know it will want. By spotting them first, you will have an advantage. You will be able to shape your business model and products to dominate them.

Yellow bananas are already ripe. The voice of the cus-tomer has spoken. Brown bananas are beyond their prime. They may be good for banana bread but little more.

TIP #4

The Rule of the Three SharksWe cannot predict the future. However, we can predict the three forces of change that will shape the future.

I call these the “Three Sharks.” All products, services, strategies begin to decay the day they are introduced to the market. They are attacked by the Three Sharks of Change.

Marketplace Shark - No market ever stands still. Technology Shark - Technology advancements never stopCompetitor Shark - This is the most vicious shark of all.

You must know where these sharks are lurking today as well as know where they will be tomorrow.

TIP #5

Grind Yourself a New Set of GlassesWhen you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.

Camouflage was created in World War I when someone looked at a Picasso cubist painting.

Noteworthy: Creative thinking involves looking at the same thing as everyone else and seeing something dif-ferent. The idea for Henry Ford’s assembly line came from a beef moving disassembly line at a meat packing plant in Chicago.

TIP #6

Look Below the Iceberg

There are two kinds of customer Wants. The first are the Spoken Wants. These are the visible part of an iceberg. Spoken Wants can be seen and heard by all, especially your competitors.

Unspoken Wants, however, are the unseen part of the ice-berg. They are hidden. Your greatest opportunity is to dis-cover these before your competitors do.

Detecting these means going back to the fundamental Wants all customers seek in anything. You start by look-ing for open spaces, or cracks, between Wants that are al-ready being served. These are the unmet Wants.

TIP #7

The Three Paths of KnowledgeInnovations happen at the intersection of three paths of knowledge.

Wants - A spoken, or unspoken, value that is desirable. Needs are subsets of Wants. Most of the things we desire are not needs.

Things - Things are solutions for Wants. A Thing may be something physical, like a product, or it can be a policy, process, strategy or new business model.

Insights - This is the unique human experience of seeing an unmet Want, or an underdeveloped Thing (solution) and connecting them to create something new. This is sometimes called the Eureka! Moment, the spark that ig-nites all innovation success.

TIP #8

Study Nature

Nature has already solved many of the problems that confront you today. Improved wind turbine design and safer helicopters came from the elm tree’s seed wing structure.

Bionics is the study of borrowing ideas from nature and adapting them for human use. The idea for velcro came from a cockle burr. The two phase structure of bamboo stalks inspired fiberglass reinforced plastics.

TIP #9

Iterate!

Never go for the 100% solution immediately. Leave room to revisit the problem. You will never get it ex-actly right the first time.

Remember: First solutions are typically sub-optimal so-lutions. First problem statements are also simply start-ing points. Smart innovation is moving back and forth between problem statement and solution.

Remember: Innovation is never an event. It is a con-stant journey.

TIP #10

Don’t Design a Mousetrap

There are more than 2,400 patents for mousetraps in the US patent office and more than a dozen are applied for each year. Yet the best selling mousetrap is the snap-spring device invented more than 100 years ago.

Important: Save your innovation energy for an unmet want, not a want that is already met.

TIP #11

See the Big Picture Before Going to Work on the PartsInnovation starts with big picture thinking. It is seeing the whole before working on the parts.

Important: You have got to think about the big things, while doing the small things, so that all of the small things go in the right direction.

Contributed by Willie Fischer, Siemens Company

TIP #12

Seek Simplicity

Henry Ford once said his constant effort was in the di-rection of simplicity. Complexity is the enemy. Nearly everything we do is more complex than it needs to be.

Fact: Innovation success always arrives on the wings of simplicity.

Contributed by Chuck Graham, Ford Motor Company

TIP #13

Dig Out of Your Ruts

Your greatest enemy for tomorrow’s success can be to-day’s success.

Contributed by Phil Ratliff, Siemens Company

TIP #14

Always Use System ThinkingThe Tip of systems says that a project solution depends on how each sub-solution interacts with other sub-solutions, rather than how these sub-solutions act dependently. When one project solution is improved in-dependent of another, the total project can begin to loose its overall efficiency.

Example: A project team did a suburb job of designing a product for manufacturability, only to find out later that their manufacturability solution later defeated the marketability of the product.

TIP #15

Think Step, Stretch, and LeapThink about your project in three time dimensions.

Step: Solutions for the presentStretch: Solutions for the midterm or next generationLeap: Solutions for the long term or distant future.

This kind of three diminutional thinking can prevent you from having to “reinvent the wheel” in the future. It will also prevent you from going down “blind alleys.”

TIP #16

Direction First, Precision SecondMeasure only to the precision required. Make sure you are headed in the right direction before you begin track-ing precise degrees. Make sure you are directionally cor-rect.

Important: Relevancy is always more important than accuracy. Rough indicators are acceptable if precise data is not available. Measure all key metrics concur-rently. Take a systems view. All metrics are inter-related.

TIP #17

Measure In Real Time

Measure in real time so you will have time for correc-tive actions.

Never adopt a measurement system, metric or goal without first attempting to make sure all stakeholders agree it is the correct one. Use highly visual metrics. These can be grasped quickly and can be easily remem-bered for maximum impact.

TIP #18

Use The Innovation CubeThe Huthwaite Innovation Institute’s LEAN Design In-novation cube makes innovation a systematic repeat-able process. The cube helps your team to discover un-tapped opportunities and identify gaps in your current processes.

Hundreds of companies world wide have used the cube to help achieve LEAN Design Success.

For more information, please visitwww.barthuthwaite.com

TIP #19

Take Advantage Of Our FREE MaterialOur website provides a vast library of LEAN Design in-formation, including our LEAN Design Certification Program, all for FREE!

For more information, please visitwww.barthuthwaite.com

TIP #20

Speak With Bart HuthwaiteBart Huthwaite is a world renowned expert in LEAN Design Innovation. He is the founder of the Huthwaite Innovation Institute and the author of The LEAN De-sign Solution and The Tips of Innovation. He is an Ad-juct Faculty Member at Notre Dame.

Bart has mentored managers and teams in corporate LEAN Design Innovation worldwide at more than 1000 companies over the past 30 years.

Bart is happy to share with you his experiences imple-menting LEAN Design Innovation at no charge.

bart@barthuthwaite.com