I’m intrigued by the lessons learned from last week’s Process for Innovation conference in Chicago. The event was well attended by many different industries.  I was there to present a course on metrics, focusing on showing attendees how to determine when to start leveraging innovation metrics and which metrics should be in their portfolio. (Most companies struggle with this.)  The most frequently used measurements are return on investment, percentage of revenue from new products and cycle time.

 Quite a few attendees came from South Korea’s POSCO, one of the world’s largest steel companies. It was interesting how serious South Korea is about innovation and Six Sigma.

 LEAN Six Sigma recommended strengthening a company’s efforts by deliberately bringing in creative tools to add a component of innovation. Even when pursuing systems that are all focused on efficiency and flow, opportunities are lost if we do not step back and look for innovation opportunities. Innovation is needed at all levels. Many attendees had been trained in Six Sigma, but there is a hunger to add innovation and creativity. There has been some concern about Six Sigma hindering creativity at places like 3M. Perhaps the lesson is that special approaches are always needed to build in room for creativity and processes to promote innovation. It won’t occur naturally, especially if you are creating rigorous processes. Adding metrics to help track and measure innovation efforts can be one important key that drive the right behaviors that stimulate innovation.  

A final observation that still makes me smile: The audience had so many questions after my presentation that the conference leader had to step up and interrupt my Q&A session to get us back on track with the conference timeline.  Contrary to normal expectations, they were more interested in getting answers to their questions than they were in eating lunch.