Kaizen involves employees.
Innovation is often the brainchild of experts, or managers. These people, sitting in offices all day, are often disconnected from where value is actually created and where the grassroots total oil and gas company canada whatsapp number carry out operational activities, a place called "Gemba" in Japanese.
Their ideas are therefore based on theories and predictions, while they do not always correspond to the real needs of the company. By involving employees, solutions are the result of common-sense observations by the people who best know what hinders their work and what would allow them to improve their efficiency.
Kaizen is about taking small steps, one by one.
If we see that some areas of our company's day-to-day operations need to be changed, we can approach it in two ways. If we plan a sudden, large-scale move to address all the shortcomings at once, we will create confusion and make employees less productive as they take time to adapt to the new realities.
However, many changes can be broken down into small steps and simple solutions chosen sequentially, which will be more comfortable for employees. Of course, there are key aspects that need to be revolutionized, but often it is enough to fine-tune the details to significantly improve the results.
As you can see, innovations are much harder to implement than Kaizen. Moreover, they are often not necessary because the problem for the company lies in the unnoticed details that add up to higher costs and lower efficiency. Now that we know why big changes can be a problem and we know some of the advantages of using Kaizen, let's consider how to break down change into small steps.
If the topic of innovation has piqued your curiosity, we invite you to read our report on "Innovation in the world. How to commercialize technological innovation".