Lean Innovation

For the competitiveness of R&D it is crucial to enhance not only R&D effectiveness but also R&D efficiency. The broad success of Lean Thinking within manufacturing as Lean Production especially bases upon the extensive work to interpret the basic principles for manufacturing systems and the broad availability of examples. Comparable guiding themes are still missing for Lean Innovation. Lean Innovation today is on its way, getting more systematic. The Lean Innovation approach presented here relies on ten key principles that need to be implemented in R&D. Together they operationalise the guiding theme of Lean Innovation: “Structure Early, Synchronise Easily, Adapt Securely.”

Currently next to the minimization of the production costs the R&D-costs are coming to the fore. This is not just because the share of the R&D-costs in the product costs increases constantly, but also because in a lot of cases the R&D-resources run short and thus become the bottleneck of innovation. The lean innovation approach is concerning all the company’s product-related innovation activities targeting at the maximization of the net benefit of R&D. This article demonstrates the 5-step-realization of lean innovation in companies.