What I learned this week ... from Aberdeen's Product Innovation Summit is that the number of companies leveraging lean concepts in product development is much greater than I believed. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised, but I am. I have seen the results of our research at Aberdeen Group indicating both the value and the rising adoption of lean. I have also been fortunate enough to hear some great presentations on the application of lean in product development and even R&D. But what made me take notice this time around was that lean seemed to come at us from all angles. The lean presentations talked about lean, of course, but so did others that we hadn't expected.

Note: Graphic from Nan Mattai's presentation on "Taking Lean Principle Upstream"

Presentations Touching on Lean
Last year's Product Innovation Summit featured Mark Edmonson of Raytheon speaking about the beginnings of a lean strategy at his company, and this years Manufacturing Summit featured a presentation from Pfizer on Lean R&D. So lean outside of manufacturing has clearly been on the agenda.

This year, beyond the planned agenda, everything seemed to come back to lean! Nan Mattai, SVP and CTO at Rockwell Collins gave the first formal presentation related to lean in a talk on "Taking Lean Principles Upstream" into R&D. She explained how the Lean Toolset, which is well established in Rockwell Collins, was used to improve product development. The lean toolset was tailored for engineering, and included some cornerstones of lean including value stream mapping, visual controls, and standard processes and tools. In addition, they pursued CMMI rating and scorecards to measure and improve their development proceses and put in place continous improvement.

Later in the day, we had a fantastic lean panel, moderated by David Prawel from Longview Advisors. The panel was too short, and could have gone on for hours based on the interest level. It included some examples from David's client base as well as Mark Edmonson giving an update on his experiences at Raytheon over the last year. In addition, David Maltz explained how a small company (500 people, 6 people in Engineering) Nektar Therapeutics manages to stay lean in a highly regulated industry.

So this was all part of the agenda, and expected. What I didn't expect was the number of times lean came up in conversation. Or the passion generated by the lean panel (I had to ask people to leave so we could start the next session). In short, for a conference focused on product innovation, there was a lot of lean talk going around.

Support from the Research
Two recent benchmark reports from Aberdeen Group have highlighted the value of Lean. In May of 2007, Aberdeen published a benchmark on Lean Product Development. That benchmark indicated that Best-in-Class companies are 3 times more likely to have had lean product development in place for more than a year. Another benchmark, the Product Innovation Agenda 2010 indicated that lean will grow significantly, with adoption of lean concepts in product development growing from 18% at the end of 2007 to a planned adoption of 62% by 2010 (over 3x growth). The research has been consistent, lean is much more common in the top-performing companies, and growing in adoption.

The Caveat - Lean may not be"Lean"
For many of the participants, one message was clear. Engineers and product development people may not react well to the term "lean." Because it is so well established in manufacturing, it leads people to say that it won't work for them. Common comments including "innovation isn't linear like manufacturing" or "product development is iterative" may be true, but shouldn't be used to imply that lean doesn't work outside of manufacturing. Lean Manufacturing doesn't work outside of manufacturing, but lean concepts work across the enterprise and - as seen in the presentations and the research - work in product development, R&D, and Engineering. While some companies have a lean culture and used "lean" as a way to validate and justify their plans, others have made the word "lean" taboo in their programs. I guess it comes down to knowing your organization, but it's good to be senstitive to the issue either way.

So lean product development is getting a lot more attention than I thought. Who knew? I understestimated it, if you didn't let us know about it.