Six Sigma and Innovation

Six Sigma promoters and innovation advocates have emerged as opposing camps in the battle for tool supremacy in the organization improvement wars. As Business Week said in “Six Sigma: So Yesterday?” and “At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency and Creativity,” which described how GE, Home Depot, 3M, Young & Rubicam, and Intuit are distancing themselves from traditional Six Sigma, “The reason [Six Sigma] caught fire was its effectiveness in cutting costs and improving profitability; that makes it a powerful tool—if those are a company’s goals. But as innovation becomes the cause du jour, companies are increasingly confronting the side effects of a Six Sigma culture…Once a company has done the requisite belt-tightening,…kick-starting the top line becomes paramount; the best way there apart from acquisition is innovation.”

Here are the results of my experience integrating Six Sigma and innovation:

• Choosing between Six Sigma and innovation is like choosing whether to take the bus to work or bring your lunch. We learned in the 1980s that organizations don’t have to trade off quality and productivity; similarly, Six Sigma can enhance rather than squelch innovation.
  
• If your Six Sigma program is solely dedicated to cost reduction and productivity improvement, you aren’t getting the full return on your investment. Its precepts and tools can be powerful contributors to the growth that comes from innovation.
  
• First-rate strategy formulation draws heavily on innovation. Benchmark strategy implementation draws heavily on tools such as those provided by Six Sigma.
  
• Six Sigma brings to the innovation table a framework for identifying innovation opportunities, evaluating innovative ideas, and tracking the results of implemented innovations.
  
• Six Sigma’s define, measure, analyze, and control steps should be fact-based. Describing a problem and finding its cause aren’t exercises in creativity. However, the success of the improve step can be enhanced by innovation tools and an innovation-friendly culture.
  
• Successful integration of Six Sigma and innovation begins with an assessment of the health of the current relationship and roles. The diagnostic questions are:
  • Are you using Six Sigma as a strategic weapon or merely for operational improvement?
  • Does your Six Sigma process specify the steps that require an innovation mindset and tools? Does your innovation process use the define-measure-analyze-improve-control framework as a vehicle for targeting and processing creative ideas?
  • Does your culture support both management-by-fact and creativity?
  • Do your leaders understand the role that Six Sigma and innovation play? Do they model the behaviors that support both?
  • Do your managers and front-line employees in all functions have both innovation and Six Sigma skills?
  • Do you appropriately measure both innovation and operational efficiency?

An organization that excels at idea generation fails if it can’t select the best of those ideas and then effectively and efficiently implement them. An organization that focuses entirely on eliminating waste is in the futile pursuit of saving itself rich. World-class organizations are able to balance and meld innovation and operational excellence.

About The Author

Alan P. Brache

Alan P. Brache is vice president, client solution design, at Kepner-Tregoe Inc., a global strategy development and implementation consultancy based in Princeton, New Jersey.