Exploring the impact of lean management on innovation capability

Abstract

Lean management and innovation are two driving forces of today's business success. However, with fundamentally different concepts, some aspects of lean management may negatively affect a company's capability to be successful with certain types of innovations. This paper develops a framework to analyze such impacts. With comparisons between the lean culture, lean design, lean supply chain management and lean human resource management with the characteristics and contributing factors of different types of innovations, five propositions are presented. Each proposition can be tested through several hypothesis tests in future work. In addition, different strategies for a company to achieve the balance and maintain lean and innovation at the same time are also discussed. Advantages, disadvantages, and suitable situations for each strategy are analyzed.