Creating a Lean Culture of Innovation - Success or failure with innovation is all based on culture just as it is with operational excellence.

​This workshop teaches the principles of lean startups within a company, using simulations, interactions, and examples. It applies to all businesses and services that want to become more innovative.

Although lean has found widespread application in manufacturing and services, there have been very few sustained implementations in R&D — and even less in the innovation creation process. Lean startup thinking has energized some areas of application (e.g., software development), but manufacturing innovation has yet to fully embrace lean principles.

The resistance to lean and innovation is unfortunate: the benefits of applying lean principles to innovation or R&D — even at the fuzzy front end of the innovation cycle — can be much higher than what has been accomplished in traditional applications, such as manufacturing and services. Benefits include greater agility, more successful new products, better delivery, and much faster speed to market.

This workshop focuses on the following topics:

Why innovation is important in all industries, services, and processes

• The lean principles that take an idea to a successful product
• Examples and case studies of successful implementations
• Key tools and features:
• Quick learning cycles (agile, scrum)
• Minimum viable products
• Fail fast and often to succeed quickly
• How to engage people in a lean transformation

Innovation and product development subjects, including understanding customer value, collaboration, critical questions, quick learning cycles, minimum viable products, concurrent development, agile, and scrum

Coaching participants through the creation of a virtual new product by using a sprint cycle (my version of a hackathon)

By attending this workshop, what will attendees be able to do upon returning to work on Monday?

Apply lean thinking to their innovation creation process

• Develop a roadmap to allow everybody to be successful at efficiently creating innovative products, services and processes
• How to engage the people in the transformation and the new process
• Level of appropriate lean experience for workshop participants:

This workshop is suitable for leaders, managers and practitioners in R&D organizations.

Norbert Majerus is a highly experienced man. Beginning in 2005, Norbert implemented a principles-based lean product development process at the three Global Innovation Centers of The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. For more than a decade he was Goodyear’s lean champion in research and development.

Norbert, born and raised in Luxembourg, has a Master’s degree in Chemistry from the Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, Germany. He joined Goodyear in Luxembourg in 1978, transferred to Akron in 1983, and has worked most disciplines in the Goodyear innovation centers in Luxembourg and Akron.

In 2016, Norbert published his first book, Lean-Driven Innovation (Norbert Majerus, CRC Press, 2016), which received the Shingo Research Award. Also in 2016, with Norbert’s guidance the Goodyear R&D organization applied for and received the AME Excellence Award. Norbert has spoken at many conferences in the United States and other countries. Since retiring from Goodyear in 2017, he continues to share his extensive lean expertise via norbert majerus consulting. His latest contribution is his second book Winning Innovation, recently released!

Sam Landers is retired R&D Fellow at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., graduated from The University of Akron with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1969. During his 42 years at Goodyear, Sam has been granted more than 60 patents and has directed cross-functional teams in the successful development and release of more than 30 new passenger tire products including the award winning Aquatred and the Assurance featuring TripleTred technology.

In 2004, Sam was promoted to R&D Fellow, the highest non-management title in Goodyear's Research & Development organization. The position recognizes technical proficiency, experience, creativity, foresight and a demonstrated ability to anticipate and solve complex technical problems. Sam was only the fifth person to achieve this honor since the position was created in 1980.

During Sam’s career he has received many of Goodyear’s highest honors for a technology associate. He won Goodyear’s Dinsmore Merit Award for original thinking and cooperative action in the development of better products in 2001 and was twice named Inventor of the Year. Other notable awards include being named a Distinguished Inventor by the Intellectual Property Owners and Distinguished Corporate Inventor by the American Society of Patent Holders in 1993.

After retirement from Goodyear, Sam formed an LLC to provide what he learned during his career about innovation, technology development, and product development. Over the ten years that the LLC was active, Sam provided papers and lectures to numerous companies in many different markets as well as volunteering as an Engineer in Residence for a middle and high STEM school. Today, Sam continues to freely share his insights.