Innovation Process Management

Dr. Nat: From your experience, can you give examples, good and bad, of how the innovation process was managed?

Dr. Atkins: Let me pick the good one first. It's easier to talk about a good one. As you related in the introduction, I led a group of highly innovative engineers at the company of McDonald Douglas Technologies, Inc, and the process that we used there was a set of tools developed under the total quality management movement that was going on at that time, and that process included the use of quality function deployment, using the house of qualities at multiple levels to related the wants and the hows and the ranking of one house to the wants and hows and relationships to a second tier house resulting in a planning process that allowed the individual on the floor to relate his or her project totally to the strategic business objective of the company. Then we took that from that point and brought in things such as design of experiments which allowed us to look at the various variables that we were trying to understand and how they influenced the results that we were getting whether they were good or bad and use that particular discipline process to adjust and focus our research direction to allow us to maximize our output while minimizing our false starts on various things. If we took that process into production we would apply the tools such as SPC and the other ones to make sure that the process that we had come up with had been optimized so in my opinion that one worked really well from what a beginning of a problem is; you started out with a want. What does the customer want? What is the problem want? Getting them well established, getting a good correlation matrix with many multiple solutions which forced the engineers to come up with more than one answer, but they came up with multiple answers and carrying that on into getting a well documented, ready for production end state that we could either transfer to another business unit within the McDonald Douglas Corporation or we could continue the process of production in our own facility. A form of a bad, and I don't want to call it bad because there's no such thing as bad because they all resulted in a less efficient process that we use early on and it was surrounded on who could talk the best, who could sell their idea the best without any kind of discipline approach going in and we actually had people who were really good at selling things, but they couldn't produce anything. They would come in with what sounded like a good idea and when we ultimately looked at it closer later on in time, we found out maybe it wasn't the optimal approach and with it not having any discipline to it always resulted in inefficient mode so in my opinion that would represent a bad approach.