Creating a Lean R&D System

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Preface

Lean has a long and rich history of innovation and expansion. From some

early eorts to improve a machine shop at Toyota, Lean’s ability grew to

where it could improve full production lines. Further eort enabled Lean

to tackle the improvement of entire plant operations, and extended its

value stream further and further back to its suppliers. Beyond produc-

tion, Lean learned to improve strategy; to improve execution, technology,

product development, and design; and to integrate these eorts into the

growing learning capabilities of Toyota. From this expansion, it is clear

that Lean is a learning, evolving platform—a research project whose goal

is to explore the how and why of work and to devise ever-increasing capa-

bilities to change work for the better.

I am very lucky to have been involved in the great research project

known as “Lean.” When I began my Lean experience in research and

development (R&D), I was blessed with a new frontier to explore. ere

were, of course, and there remain, vast numbers of people engaged in

improving technology, developing science, and pushing the frontiers of

knowledge to create new products, technologies, processes, and capabili-

ties. But at the time I began working in Lean, there were scant few people

working to understand how to improve R&D, writ large, in a scientic

and systematic way.

At that time, people were much more likely to imagine improving R&D

productivity by giving it more (or less) money, organizing it into (or out of)

functional or project teams, changing its location, scaling it up or atomizing

it through outsourcing, or by changing the amount or timing of input from

various functions. ere were far fewer engaged in studying the thinking

processes of R&D, the causes of R&D successes and failures, and the phi-

losophies and assumptions about R&D, and in creating experiments to test,

assess, and improve them. Yet there was, and remains, a need to answer fun-

damental questions that aect the capability of R&D in delivering valuable

innovation. Can you learn to create “eureka!” moments that drive leaps in

innovation, and if so, can you teach it? What are the barriers to innovation,

and how can we remove them? In some areas, a key recurring question is:

How can scientists better motivate themselves and each other to overcome