Toyota the Innovator

9 May 2008 at 2:07 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Jim Surowiecki’s latest New Yorker column focuses on Toyota and makes several important points about innovation.

Process innovation is at least as important as, though less visible than, product innovation.
Innovation can be an incremental process in which “the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis.”
Process innovations often bubble up from the bottom, rather than the top, of the hierarchy.
Cumulative, bottom-up, process innovation is really hard to imitate. “[T]he fundamental ethos of kaizen — slow and steady improvement — runs counter to the way that most companies think about change. Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you’ll be thin for life. The Toyota approach is more like a regular, sustained diet — less immediately dramatic but, as everyone knows, much harder to sustain.”

These points are well known in the innovation literature but Surowiecki’s succinct and elegant presentation is well worth a read, even by specialists.

See also Steve Postrel’s earlier post on Toyota.