Applying Agile and Lean Elements to Accelerate Innovation Culture in a Large Organization – Key Learnings After One Year Journey

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes how lean elements have been applied in a large company to change existing agilean culture towards innovation culture. Innovation concentrates on radical, new business innovations but covers product and process innovations as well. The main motivation and need to build the innovation culture was an assumption that the company has a lot of competence and innovation potential not utilized. The final goal is to measure if the actions taken really have an impact to the amount and quality of new, radical innovations and business growth of the company. This paper is limited to the intermediary results achieved after the first year being (1) ideas-to-innovations value stream established (2) idea flow and positive pull created among personnel and (3) group of perfection practices has been stabilized for continuous improvement. We plan to describe, measure and analyze concrete examples of radical innovations in the future.

Fostering Continuous Innovation with Engaging IT-Assisted Transparent Information Sharing: A Case Study

“…The case company is a B2B provider of embedded systems for the wireless industry, having around 30 years of expertise in advanced radio communication technologies with more than 500 employees in four countries. The company had used the traditional stage-gate model for their ideation well over ten years [21]. In the stage-gate innovation process, the collected ideas focused only on creating intellectual property rights (IPR), which was confidential information and which involved only a limited number of experts.…”

“…To improve the abovementioned situation, the company set a grand innovation strategy to have more radical innovations (products or applications) to scale the business by utilizing the full potential of the entire organization. The improvement focused on radical new business innovations but covered product and process innovations as well [21]. First, the company decided to adopt a more experimental approach in their idea harvesting, focusing, and validation.…”

“…In order to measure the impacts of the improvements on continuous innovation performance, the company set up the following KPIs (Table 2). Several actions were conducted to improve the innovation practices in the company [21]. Fig.…”

“…The KPI data collection and follow-up is automated in the tool system. In this paper we call it as the Ideas Tool (idea collection, ideation, idea management tool [21]). Another significant change in the innovation approach was that the continuous innovation process was copied to various places across the organization to support idea creation on a local level.…”

Process innovation capability in less-structured business processes: a systematic literature review

“…Several studies have investigated the concept and practicality of process innovation in large and well-structured organizations (Radicic and Pinto, 2019;Fang and Wu, 2006;Partanen and Matinlassi, 2015). Furthermore, there are numerous studies on process innovation in general that do not distinguish between fully structured and unstructured business processes (Godart et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2018), even though each business process has different characteristics (Szela ˛gowski and Lupeikiene, 2020).…”