Manufacturing Innovation: Teamwork and Strategic Planning

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Manufacturing Innovation: Teamwork and Strategic Planning

Interview with Dr. Kenneth Kahn, director of the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship at Purdue University.

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If you’re thinking about where are some of the best practices for innovation, I think the one overriding element is cross-functional teams and the reason I bring that up is oftentimes when we think about small business, we think about individuals taking on an initiative but truly when you look at those projects that are of high success are the ones where you’re combining talents of multiple individuals. So it’s the ability to actually bring together people with different expertise and properly manage these teams so that they really are creating something that individuals by themselves cannot create. I’d been in meetings for the past couple of days and this is actually been one of the number one themes has been an issue of teamwork. Now another theme that actually has been emerging is a strategic plan and it’s very critical that companies think about where do they want to take their business and not so much in terms of how much do we want to grow. A great example would be a company saying, “Well, we want to be double the size in 3 years.” Well, how are you going to get there if you haven’t been thinking about what you need to do and that’s what the strategic plan should do. So companies need to think about what do they specifically want to do, not what they want to achieve in terms of financial goals but what do they need to do to achieve that objective of being twice the size they want to be. So if you want to be 100 employees in three years with revenues twice of what you’re currently making, what are the products that you have to do, what are the markets you have to be to achieve that and that will then drive the innovation decisions. There’s something else in addition to that is to be careful on what do you think about with innovation. So if you’re making…if you look at innovation, innovation is certainly is an investment and you can make decisions for short-term gain or you can make investments for long-term gain. Innovation in the sense of product innovation or business model innovation are long-term investments that many companies will tend to look at. Well, I can invest $10 million now on advertising and get an immediate return and so maybe grow our business by $15 million or $20 million if I invest $10 million on advertising or new marketing whereas if I invest in new innovations, in new product innovations, product development, I may not see the immediate return but maybe I grow my business to $40 million in three years but I won’t see that in three years. And so that’s the issue is companies, they have to be risk taking.


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