How I’ve Aimed to Share the Uncommon Knowledge of Lean Product and Process Development

My exit ramp from a rewarding 20-year corporate career in the steel, machinery, and plastics industries led me to Kettering University, a private university in Flint, MI, specializing in STEM 17 years ago. As a “pracademic,” I teach my students the leadership of innovation development using practical methods that work in industry, like lean product and process development (LPPD).

Lean, in general, and LPPD specifically, is a set of “uncommon knowledge”; in other words, the principles that work but are not obvious. This is the real value of a discipline. Yet, encouraging learners to change their way of thinking to accept something different, no matter how good it appears, is not easy.

A few years into my second career of teaching, Kettering asked its professors to add some entrepreneurial activity to their courses. I went one step further and asked to create an entirely new course in new product development, and they let me! I had many years of experience in leading development in a mid-size industrial company and was delighted to teach principles of new product development. 

Given the wise recommendation of another academic, I chose a well-regarded text on the subject. Still, it didn’t have LPPD in it. Over the years, I migrated this course away from typical development to teaching mostly LPPD, with more traditional development to round out the innovation system. Why? LPPD is about learning first through experimentation and then designing great products. Test, then design. I still teach this course, known as “Innovation Development,” at Kettering today.

Learning by doing

Project-based learning is the most appreciated feature of courses I teach. I learned good methods of teaching from great corporate trainers. Fortunately, this approach is increasingly common in higher education, yet the emphasis on lecture and recitation is persistent. I can work passionately to present carefully crafted course content, but nothing compares to applying it to a project of your own imagination.

Students pick a course project, then apply LPPD principles to their project. The best classes are those when I (briefly!) introduce principles of the topic, then students apply them. Often, there are one or two short exercises that reinforce the principles before they apply them. I provide guidance, suggestions, and feedback, which is sometimes called “grading.” In short, what seems to work is just doing the work of LPPD. Practicing the principles by doing the method is what sticks, and yes, students need a coach.

I can tirelessly explain a lean principle and provide examples, but when the exercise that applies to that principle begins, no one does it the lean way the first time. It takes coaching and practice doing the LPPD way for it to stick. What we do in LPPD is hard because it is not the norm, and it’s effective precisely for this reason. Like most educators, seeing the “light bulbs go on” when students start to understand something new and challenging is a great reward. There are so many lessons here for how we develop talent in our organizations.

What comes next

A company that truly practices LPPD is rare. A fraction of organizations actually do development, and development is not a large function in an organization. Plus, the number of people who lead the innovation system are few.

Change is in the air. And while a true LPPD organization is rare, many organizations are beginning to practice the principles of LPPD without identifying them as such.

However, we’ve now witnessed three decades of expansion of LPPD from a few researchers to an established discipline. Change is in the air. And while a true LPPD organization is rare, many organizations are beginning to practice the principles of LPPD without identifying them as such. Some amazing organizations are doing development dramatically differently, and they look a lot like LPPD. The names change, but the uncommon principles are solid. Principles like Put People First; Understand Before You Execute; Make Product Development a Team Sport; Synchronize Workflows; Build in Learning and Reuse Knowledge; and Design the Value Stream

So, as LPPD leaders and practitioners, we need to help each other out. We need more sharing of examples, ideas, materials, and exercises. We need more researchers investigating why LPPD works and generalizing that knowledge, and we need to deliver more learning opportunities to coach and mentor the next generation of practitioners.The youngest generations of practitioners are entering the workforce with great capabilities and a desire to do good and do well. We’ve seen what is good. Even if getting people to think differently about product development is challenging, we owe these generations the time and attention of our mentoring skills.