Innovation and Concept Selection

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When the improvement required needs to be more than an incremental change to the existing product or process an ideation technique is needed. Once ideas for problem solutions are identified, the best option must be selected.

Quick reference

Innovation and Concept Selection

When the improvement required needs to be more than an incremental change to the existing product or process an ideation technique is needed. Once ideas for problem solutions are identified, the best option must be selected.

When to use

During the Improve stage, the Lean Six Sigma team must identify solution options. If an incremental option is not viable, then an innovative one must be selected. The team often has multiple options to choose from and an analysis is needed to determine which is best. 

Instructions

Lean Six Sigma builds on an existing process or product.  The defect or problem is waste or variation in an existing process or product.  The Lean analysis starts with a SIPOC of an existing process.  The Six Sigma analysis starts with the process capability of an existing product or process.  This grounding in the As-Is current state acts as an anchor or paradigm to solution generation.  For that reason, the solutions are inevitably incremental in nature. 

However, sometimes the solution needs to be innovative and go beyond incremental change.  A transformative innovation is needed.  When that is the case, the team will need to employ lateral thinking techniques to break away from the current paradigm.  Several techniques that have proven effective are:

  • Mind-mapping – a visual brainstorming technique that takes each brainstormed idea and connects other ideas to it to create a map to a different innovative concept.
  • Six Hat thinking – this technique looks at a solution to a problem from six different perspectives.  It provides a more balanced view of the problem which often leads to an innovative solution.
  • Provocation and Movement – this technique intentionally suspends one of the core constraints or assumptions relating to a problem (the provocation) and then seeks to find a solution in that newly changed circumstance (movement). This serves as an instigator of innovative ideas with respect to the problem.
  • Pugh Concept Generation – this idea generation and selection technique is a quick way to evaluate and synthesize competing ideas into a powerful innovation. This was covered in-depth in a different lesson.

Mind-mapping has become commonplace as a technique for organizing and facilitating a brainstorming session. The mind map is similar in many respects to a Fishbone diagram except instead of looking for root causes, it is creating solution paths. The graphical nature of the mind map often adds to the creativity of the team.

Concept Selection

Many Lean Six Sigma projects will identify multiple approaches for resolving the root cause(s) of their problem. Some of these approaches are complementary and can be implemented in conjunction with each other. However, due to cost and time constraints, many times one concept for problem resolution must be selected to be piloted in the Improve stage before introducing it broadly in the Control Stage.

The concept solution matrix is a derivation of the X-Y matrix used in the Measure phase to prioritize which data items would be collected. Now it will be used to prioritize which solution option should be selected. When creating the matrix use the project CTQs as some of the prioritization criteria. However, you also need to include appropriate business constraints with respect to costs, resources, or schedule milestones as additional internal CTQ criteria. Following the typical X-Y matrix format, the CTQ criteria are weighted and the solutions are then evaluated with respect to each of the CTQs. For each solution the criteria weight is multiplied by the relationship score for that criteria and all the scores are summed for the solution. The solution with the highest score is the recommended option.

Hints & tips

  • When doing ideation for innovative solutions, invite people with diverse backgrounds to the brainstorming session. They will likely have different perspectives and ideas that can help to drive innovation.
  • Use colors and pictures with mind-mapping that has a tendency to help people make different connections and can help to break paradigms.
  • Different weighting on the solution selection matrix can result in different solutions being recommended. Be careful not to let an individual’s bias affect the ratings so that “their idea” will win. Let the stakeholders set the weighting levels, not the team.
  • When two solutions are virtually equal in the solution selection matrix, I normally use an ease of implementation by the current members of the Lean Six Sigma team to act as the tie-breaker. That lowers implementation risk.
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  • 00:04 I am Ray Sheen.
  • 00:06 Sometimes in the improve stage,
  • 00:08 you find that you need a somewhat radical innovation to resolve the problem.
  • 00:13 This lesson will discuss that dilemma and
  • 00:15 provide a technique that can help you through that situation.
  • 00:19 Lean Six Sigma has a dilemma with respect to innovation.
  • 00:23 I know some will tell you that it sparks innovation and
  • 00:26 transforms a business, well, no it doesn't.
  • 00:30 Lean Six Sigma incrementally improves the performance of the existing product or
  • 00:34 process.
  • 00:35 Now, if a improvement is a radical concept in your organization,
  • 00:39 you could say that Lean Six Sigma creates a business transformation.
  • 00:43 But for most organizations, improvement has become a way of life.
  • 00:47 Lean Six Sigma assists that initiative with a structured and data-driven process.
  • 00:53 But face it, they start with the existing process and
  • 00:56 seek to improve the existing process.
  • 00:59 The starting point is always the as-is process in the current process or product
  • 01:03 performance data, meaning the defects associated with that current process.
  • 01:08 That leads to an internal thinking and a paradigm caused by internal or
  • 01:12 existing constraints.
  • 01:13 Lean is constrained by the product boundaries found in the SIPOC, and
  • 01:18 Six Sigma is constrained by the process capability or
  • 01:21 sigma level of existing metrics.
  • 01:23 Sometimes we need to break out of these internal boundaries and
  • 01:26 create solutions that are radically different from the current approach.
  • 01:30 This is hard for the subject matter experts who know the existing product and
  • 01:35 processes so well.
  • 01:36 They bring a current state paradigm with them.
  • 01:40 Here are several techniques to help break away from the current state.
  • 01:43 All of these are done in a brainstorming or facilitated discussion format.
  • 01:48 Mind-mapping is a graphical way to annotate your brainstorming.
  • 01:53 I'll talk about this more in the next slide.
  • 01:56 Lateral thinking comes when you take a branch of your mind map and
  • 01:59 proceed down that path on a journey.
  • 02:01 At each step, challenge and remove an assumption or
  • 02:05 constraint to create more branches.
  • 02:08 Six hat thinking forces the team to consider the problem from multiple
  • 02:12 perspectives.
  • 02:14 Each hat is a different perspective.
  • 02:16 This prevents the team from immediately discarding a flawed, but
  • 02:21 otherwise interesting concept that could be expanded to meet the project goals.
  • 02:26 Provocation and movement is the intentional breaking of a constraint.
  • 02:30 A provocation,
  • 02:31 stating something that is currently impossible, but then investigating
  • 02:35 what if that was now possible on the constraint no longer existed.
  • 02:40 Again, this will expose new possibilities that can be pursued.
  • 02:44 And I already talked about Pugh in an earlier lesson, so
  • 02:48 let's discuss mind-mapping.
  • 02:50 This is a graphical technique for
  • 02:52 facilitating a free flowing brainstorming session.
  • 02:55 It can be a great way to move on when the team has stuck on just one idea.
  • 03:01 Start with the problem at the center of the map,
  • 03:04 now branch out from that on a number of different directions.
  • 03:07 For starters, you could use the six M's of Materials, Methods, Manpower,
  • 03:12 Machines, Measurements, and Mother Nature, but you can also use other paths.
  • 03:17 Now this is different from a fishbone analysis,
  • 03:19 which was trying to identify root causes.
  • 03:21 In this case, you're looking for what can we change and
  • 03:25 do differently to get a different performance level?
  • 03:28 Some people like to use colors, pictures,
  • 03:31 or graphics to further stimulate the thinking process.
  • 03:34 This is because many people are much better communicating with
  • 03:38 pictures than with words.
  • 03:40 Try not to let constraints get in the way,
  • 03:42 let the discussions go wherever it wants to go.
  • 03:45 Even if some of the ideas are outside the bounds of what current business practices
  • 03:49 would allow, they can get creativity going.
  • 03:52 Once we have a lot of great ideas, we can then apply the constraints.
  • 03:56 In fact, that's what I'll do now.
  • 03:57 We'll come back to our old friend the X-Y matrix that we used to
  • 04:02 prioritize factors for investigation.
  • 04:05 Now, we'll use it to prioritize improvement paths.
  • 04:09 At this point, we often refer to this as a solution selection matrix.
  • 04:14 It will relate the project CTQs to different solution concepts in order to
  • 04:19 decide on the solution path.
  • 04:21 Now, you may be thinking this is what we do with Pugh.
  • 04:25 Well, not quite.
  • 04:26 With Pugh, we were looking for viability and improvement.
  • 04:29 We usually don't have constraints like project costs and resource availability
  • 04:34 in a Pugh Matrix, and we definitely don't wait the factors in a Pugh Matrix.
  • 04:39 However, both of these are prominent in the solution selection matrix.
  • 04:43 So this matrix will prioritize the options based on both their technical performance
  • 04:49 and our ability to implement them within the overall business constraints.
  • 04:53 As you can see, we list all the CTQs and
  • 04:56 then we weight them based on our stakeholder input.
  • 04:59 We'll use the classic X-Y matrix method and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10.
  • 05:05 We then list the solutions and rate them with respect to the CTQs.
  • 05:10 And again, I prefer the 1-3-9 scale, but many people use the 1-5-9 scale.
  • 05:16 You will likely get the same results regardless of which scale you use.
  • 05:21 Then multiply the weight times the score for the cell score, and
  • 05:25 add the cells across to come up with a solution score.
  • 05:28 As I said, you want to make sure that you have
  • 05:31 the business implementation constraints included in your list of CTQs.
  • 05:35 They may not be the external customer CTQs, but
  • 05:38 they are definitely internal customer CTQs.
  • 05:42 The goal of the improved stage is to have a viable solution to the problem and
  • 05:46 may require a radical improvement or innovation, but
  • 05:49 it needs to be something that's realistic for the organization.

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