Value-Driven Innovation includes Lean Principles and Approaches such as the Toyota Development System, modern Value Engineering and Analysis, and our own proprietary Value-driven Innovation Models. Value-Driven Innovation integrates Lean Principles with our frameworks for innovation such as the DC Cycle™ and Business Exchange Model™  to create practical approaches to designing in high value, low system cost solutions.

What is Value-Driven Innovation?

Lean Methodology has revolutionized production practices in virtually all world-class industries. The principles of Lean and the associated methods have been gradually moving upstream toward the product and concept development end of the lifecycle.

However, a literal translation of many of the practices of Lean in the manufacturing area actually work counter-productively in the concept and early development phases. For example, while variability is avoided in manufacturing, it is a requirement during concept development, in terms of having design alternatives. So how principles of Lean are interpreted and applied to the innovation stages of the lifecycle are often very different.

What is constant is the need to innovate toward the key values driving your business which include both customer and company values. Waste then is interpreted in the larger system context.

Value Engineering and Analysis fit perfectly into the Lean scheme of things. Value Analysis discovers customer-relevant performance and relates it back to the systems providing that functionality in a way that enables designers and engineers to seek lower cost solutions to provide equivalent product performance. In addition to reducing costs, Value Analysis intelligently applied can become a powerful and highly relevant Innovation Driver. Therefore, value engineering is a key piece of the total Value-Driven Innovation package.

Value-Driven Innovation is a comprehensive system which prepares, informs and directs innovation processes to focus on maximizing business value, minimizing total system waste, maximizing flow rates, minimizing turbulence and "stops" (including gates!), and creating total development system optimization rather than optimizing piecemeal.

Although the concepts seem easy to understand, there are many components and tricks of the trade to get it to work correctly.

Innovation Frameworks has developed a framework for innovation which integrates the components into a cohesive whole and adapts to a very wide variety of situations. The framework for Lean Innovation adapts the principles to your methods of product development and makes Lean accessible to your company.

Why do we need a consultant

To use lean terminology, a consultant can help you avoid wasted effort and maximize total system value generated by a product or process. You save time and energy by avoiding common pitfalls, benefiting from cross-company experiences and by getting the right expertise in the right place at the right time.

Your consultant can help you lay out a program, grow your capability in the right sequence and avoid common mistakes.

There are many counter-intuitive methods in Lean. Using "common sense thinking" can actually make you do the wrong thing. Your consultant can help you through these minefields.

Perhaps most importantly, your consultant will address the Value-Driven Innovation process in the context of our Innovators Framework™. This model is designed to properly sequence and organize the innovation processes in your projects.