Sustainable Business Practices Balance Creativity and Efficiency
June 22nd, 2012 by 
“Many companies suffer from disproportionately high breakthrough project failure rates because they find it hard to balance execution discipline with flexibility to respond to changing technical and market realities. When executing on breakthrough projects, use detailed maturity checklists to establish flexible yet guard-railed execution paths.” -CEB Views
The Harvard Business Review post, Innovators, Are You Applying the Wrong Lessons from Manufacturing?, examines two often diverging processes in product development. The article distinguishes between product development and product delivery.
- Manufacturing produces physical objects; product developers produce information.
- Manufacturing produces things; product developers produce the recipes for making things.
- Manufacturing deals with stationary targets; product developers deal with moving targets.
Clients in our sustainability consulting practice often ask, “What circumstances, frameworks or parameters need to be in place to spark creativity, ideas, and innovation in my business?”. For the most part, markets tend to respond much more quickly to meet desires than respond to resistance. We believe that sustainability concepts are bringing many diverging forces into alignment.
An open innovation approach fosters an environment for creative ideas and inspired actions from both internal and external stakeholders. Our sustainability consulting promotes social media engagement strategies as an avenue to align creativity and efficiency across the value chain.
Article by Julie Urlaub, Founder and Managing Partner at Taiga Company; appearing courtesy 3BL Media.
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Tags:  engagement manufacturing product development stakeholders sustainability | [ Permalink ] |
