Toyota's Tips for Mastering Innovation (Part 1)

21st May 2009

By Karen MacKenzie
SQMC Associate

In a 'credit crunch', mastering innovation is a ‘must’. Toyota is the single most profitable company in the world and even they are suffering at the moment. However, their success is due to their ability to innovate (they implement one million suggestions a year!!) and their management systems.

Here are some of Toyota's top ideas:-

Ingenuity as a way of operating... a behaviour:  Learn it. Develop it. Perfect it. It’s a different mindset and therefore risky, and it’s a form of leadership. Whatever your work, make it your art, your canvas and your sandbox. All kinds of good things happen when you do.
The discipline of increments: Dealing with small increments lets you experiment more, get results quicker and learn faster. The more ideas you have, the more patterns and possibilities emerge... along with possibilities of combining ideas; the multiplier effect of compounding ideas. Chase perfection with daily incremental innovation.

It's a matter of context: Context is like the frame in art. If the canvas doesn’t fit the frame, the whole thing doesn’t quite work. Sometimes we are too concerned with the masterpiece to concentrate on the frame. How often have you heard ‘think outside the box’ and how many do that without even knowing what the box is?! The box is context and you have 2 choices – make your idea fit within the box or build a brand new box to replace the old one.
Learning and Hansei (the Japanese word for reflection): In Toyota the rigorous review conducted after an action has been taken plays a huge part in their learning curve. Hansei is a sobering reality check regardless of a project’s outcome. Hansei is about thinking to foster learning and insight. It is a profound skill to be mastered. It flies in the face of the ‘if it aint broke don’t fix it’ philosophy.