Innovation and flexibility – consistent or contradictory?

Citation

Bennett, D. (2009), "Innovation and flexibility – consistent or contradictory?", Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Vol. 20 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmtm.2009.06820gaa.001

Innovation and flexibility – consistent or contradictory?

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Volume 20, Issue 7

Recently, I was asked to provide a short contribution for a book on “Innovation futures” (von Stamm and Trifilova, 2006). This seemed an appropriate request, because when revising the editorial objective and scope of the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management (JMTM) I included “Technological innovation in manufacturing” among the additional topics. However, at the same time I was thinking about the relationship between innovation and flexibility, since JMTM was originally titled Flexible Manufacturing Systems Magazine. Are these two concepts consistent or contradictory? This may be a strange question because surely it is entirely consistent for companies to be both innovative and flexible?

To address the question we should start by examining the meaning of both concepts. First, innovation is the process of “devising and taking to market new products and services” or simply “the introduction of something new” (a useful short definition). Second, flexibility, in the sense understood by most companies, means “an ability to cope with changes in design of the product or service, or with variations in volume and variety of demand”.

In terms of the skills required to be either innovative or flexible there are indeed many similarities. They both require a capability to think imaginatively and laterally, a need to exploit the resources for research, development and production, and an ability to move faster than competitors. Indeed, there was a time when these skills were regarded as the primary requirement for both innovation and flexibility.

Today, however, these skills are not, on their own, sufficient for either innovation or flexibility. As competition has increased and with the pressure to reduce costs, it has become necessary to enhance the way they are deployed through the use of better project management and, more importantly, to improve the efficiency with which both are delivered through the application of technologies (both hard and soft).

As a result of pursuing these enhancements the way that flexibility is now achieved in many modern companies is through the principles of modularity or by employing a universal design “platform”. Through these means many new products can quickly be developed by combining and adapting existing modules or by building on a limited number of standard platforms (or foundations). Consequently, the principles are used extensively by many diverse industries from automobile manufacture to computing (e.g. Volkswagen Group has used modules and platforms since the 1970s to develop new products and Sun Microsystems has used the Java platform since 1995 as the basis for creating a wide variety of software implementations).

On the other hand, the idea of using modules and platforms assumes the adoption of the principles of standardisation and simplification in design as well as production. So, this is where the concepts of innovation and flexibility appear to diverge, because many of the skills associated earlier with being innovative appear not to be consistent with the idea of standardising or simplifying the design of products. But there is also a paradox in this apparent divergence. Many companies that achieve flexibility using standardised and simplified modules and platforms remain highly competitive in terms of new product development, and therefore, by implication, they are innovative as well as being flexible through using methods that might be regarded as inhibiting innovation. However, this is not a position that such companies have reached by accident. Rather, they have been able to find and exploit synergies from concepts that outwardly are mutually exclusive. In many ways this is similar to other situations in operations management where traditionally a “trade-off” between capabilities is assumed but it can be proved possible to “have it both ways”.

So, why is this paradox relevant to the future of innovation? The main thing it means is that companies should not see innovation as a stand-alone process that is independent of other responses to the increasingly competitive and economically turbulent environment in which they now operate. The pressure for flexibility in such an environment places demands on the company that are increasingly being answered by principles that could militate against innovation. In this connection, the future will, therefore, require companies to explore beyond the contradictions that apparently exist between innovation and flexibility when the latter is achieved through modularity and design platforms. Innovation can still flourish because standardisation and simplification does not necessarily mean inaction and inertia.

David Bennett