Innovation and Improvement Teams

Dr. Nat: How do innovation themes differ from improvement themes?

Dr. Adkins: That's an interesting question. My simple answer would be that you use improvement themes everywhere. Every process throughout the organization can use improvement themes. Processes for financial management, processes for in my particular case and Boeing's case, security management since that is a critical part of the program, processes for technology. So having teams that are made up of the people in those areas, looking at how they can improve their own situations, is critical across the board. Many of those places, you won't have an innovation team. In fact you'll only have an innovation team usually where there are needs for innovation to solve a problem, obviously process improvement teams run into an area that they see a big opportunity for improvement but they don't have a solution; that's a point where innovation teams can be brought to bear to help. The big difference is there are improvement teams across the board. Everything can be improved. I don't care what it is, but everything doesn't need an innovation application to it. The process just needs to improve. If you've got a long running production line that is cranking out the product in a good manner and you don't want to change the product, the product is satisfying the customer need, there is probably not much need for innovation, but you could do some improvement on that process from the beginning to the end.