A Systematic Approach to Process Innovation

The competitive environment never seems to get any easier, and just to stay as competitive as last year we need to execute better this year. Continuous Improvement seems necessary just to stay in the game...To pull significantly ahead, an organization must make process innovations in addition to continuous improvements.A process innovation is one that significantly changes the speed, the cost, and/or an aspect of the quality of the process or service, and has the potential to change the competitive landscape.For example, an insurance company overwhelmed the competition by shortening the time between claim filing and payment from weeks to hours. A small bank picked up market share through a process innovation reducing the number of days to approval by 80%. Many businesses have learned how to do a single minute change-over.Each of these process innovations challenged and overcame powerful assumptions. Every business operates under the constraints of operating assumptions. We may not even think of them as assumptions, but rather as facts-of-life, because they are so ingrained in our organization's paradigm. But to achieve a significant breakthrough, we have to identify and overcome a significant operating assumption and rewrite the rules of the game.This is easier said than done, of course; and in most cases a systematic approach to inventive problem solving is required.In the 1950's, for example, a Russian innovator believed that innovation processes could be improved by studying patterns in problems and solutions. His team analyzed millions of patents to identify patterns, and they deduced from this data a small number of principles that can be applied to make the creative process more predictably effective. They called this research the Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving or TRIZ, (pronounced "trees"). TRIZ is an acronym for Russian words that translate as "the theory of inventive problem solving."The basic premise is that there is nothing new under the sun. Whatever your challenge, if you understand it both in its specific and general form and you do the research, you will find that someone somewhere has solved it. Then if you focus your creativity on adapting the general solution to your particular challenge, you will achieve your breakthrough faster and more predictably.


TRIZ accelerates breakthroughs by guiding the human intellect along paths most likely to be fruitful. And speed of innovation is essential because most people and groups abandon an audacious goal fairly quickly and settle for a compromise.Slow innovation = no innovation.The developers and practitioners of TRIZ observe that problems emerge from contradictions, and that most solutions aim at compromising with the contradictions instead of overcoming them. Here are some of the contradictions that may appear in the workplace:It takes time to do something the right way, but the thing must be done quickly
A task requires precision, but it must be done without precise tools
A product must have dozens of features, but it must be simple to useEach problem is a specific example of a general contradiction. TRIZ research has paired every general contradiction with a small number of general solutions. So a practitioner of TRIZ focuses her effort and intellect on translating the specific problem into one of several dozen general problems.The next step is to look up in the TRIZ resources the general solutions that have been applied to that general problem in the past. Then one focuses one's creativity on identifying and testing specific solutions that could apply the general solution to the problem at hand. TRIZ research and practice has been expanded into a rich tool kit for innovation, but probably the simplest approach is to use the '40 Principles.' A list of these can be found at triz-journal.com.