What's Constraining Your Innovation?

Abstract

OVERVIEW:Leaders regularly need more from their innovation investment while technology and marketing groups are already stretched too far. Although the typical response to this dilemma is to add process (and the attendant bureaucracy) or to teach project and time management skills, these approaches often just end up with people running faster on the same treadmill. The answer lies in the more subtle direction of the Theory of Constraints (TOC)—a tool that has historically been used to help manufacturing operations identify and eliminate bottlenecks. This approach enables innovators to rapidly improve their growth results while gradually creating a culture of continuous innovation improvement. Whether in consumer or industrial markets, whether in products or services, a TOC approach works with the current process to find the innovation bottleneck—the constraint that is holding back all the other steps in the process. Then five focusing steps are used to rigorously eliminate that constraint and move on to the next with an increase in innovation throughput as each cycle of improvement is completed.