The Mastery of Innovation

by Katherine Radeka

What do Ford Motor Company, Steelcase, Scania, Goodyear, Novo Nordisk, and Philips Electronics have in common? They all need to get their best ideas to market as fast as possible. They need to achieve the mastery of innovation.

When these companies needed to accelerate time-to-market, get more new products to customers, and improve their ROI from investments in R&D, they turned to Lean Product Development to help them master the process of innovation. By adapting Lean ideas to their specific product development challenges, they learned how to focus innovation on the problems that would maximize customer and business value, and deliver on their best ideas. Winner of a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award!
The Mastery of A Field Guide to Lean Product Development describes the experiences of 19 companies that have achieved significant results from Lean Product Development. Their stories show that Lean Product Development delivers The diverse set of North American and European case studies in this book range from very small product development organizations (three engineers) to very large (more than 10,000). Some of the industries represented include automotive, medical devices, industrial products, consumer electronics, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments, and aerospace.

These companies have generously shared their knowledge about Lean Product Development to help you get your best ideas to market faster.

266 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Ryan Kapsar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is designed to help product developers learn how to improve their processes around product development. The author walks the reader through 12 companies that are in various stages of the Lean Product Develop transformation. Unfortunately, the author kept these examples very high level and didn't go into as much detail as I would have liked. This book provided high level examples that make the case that Lean is a useful way to do product development, but didn't go into enough details to really make this a handbook for implementing the changes.

Furthermore, there were little to know examples of the product A3s that were referenced and only a few examples of the changes in scheduling. The author provides great insight that these tools work by showing that many of them are essentially must haves to be successful. However, something just felt missing in terms of HOW to do something of these things.

Finally, the editing of this book was sloppy which made it less appealing to read. There were awkward placement of pictures and inserts that made following the book jarring.

I believe that combining this book with other books on Lean Product Development is key. If this was my first introduction to LPD this would have been extremely powerful, however I've already read several books on the topic.

tl;dr: Great introduction to the concepts of Lean product development, less useful if you're looking for a more detailed guide.

[Micah Siegmund · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of case studies across a variety of companies who have employed some manner of Lean Product Development. These companies adapted Lean Manufacturing tools in varying degrees to apply to product development, and the author summarizes where they started, how they committed to initiating Lean processes, and what the results were. Interesting read and while the stories were all similar on some level there were some good nuggets in each of them.

[Helena Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the case study structure of this book. It was interesting to read how the different companies are using Lean Product Development in different ways. I especially enjoyed the story about Nielsen Kellerman, and the description of Lean Scheduling. She could have gone into more detail but then she could have written an entire book about each of the case studies.