Companies are facing increasingly tough competition in the global economy. Previously sustainable competitive advantage strategies are insufficient in the changed market conditions. The only sustainable advantage is continuous innovation at a faster pace than rival organizations. This requires a systematic approach to innovation and engaging staff on all levels to effectively take part in the innovation efforts. Toyota Kata is proven and highly successful method for continuous improvement at the whole organization level. Toyota Kata was discovered by Mike Rother while he researched Toyota’s quality improvement methods. It is a holistic system method for improvement efforts which contains processes and behavioral patterns for strategically aligned goal setting, problem solving, coaching, management and training. It is a simple and teachable approach which also covers the management of improvement efforts. The downside of the approach is its focus on incremental improvement instead of breakthrough innovation. The approach can be improved by adding TRIZ techniques like contradiction analyses, FAA, inventive principles and trends of evolution to various parts of the method. This approach will allow to keep the benefits of the Toyota Kata approach while changing the focus from incremental improvement to true innovation. The combined approach is also better suited for the more complex problems of today’s knowledge workers. Toyota Kata can also be used as method for introducing and training TRIZ to the organization in an effective and incremental way. The combined method for continuous innovation can be further improved with the Lean Startup methods to validate the solutions. The Lean Startup experimentation approach is geared to design quick and inexpensive approaches for the market validations of service, management and software innovations.

1. Continuous innovation
-
Combining Toyota Kata and TRIZ
for sustained innovation
Teemu Toivonen
Teemu.Toivonen@Nitor.fi / @number_9_

2. Teemu.Toivonen@nitordelta.com / @number_9_
 Senior Lean Consultant @ Nitor Delta
 Education: Master of Science – Helsinki University of
Technology
 15 years of experience in the IT industry
Consultant, Manager, IT Executive Board, Team Leader,
Project Manager, Programmer, Concept Designer…
 10 years of Experience in Lean and Agile
 2 years of experience with TRIZ
 Professional interests: Lean, Agile, Systematic Innovation,
Service Design, Systems Thinking, Complexity and Resilience
Goal for the presentation
To introduce the continuous innovation model which is based on Toyota Kata and
TRIZ tools and techniques and get some of you curious enough to do some
experimentation

3. Consequences of global competition
The market pressure…
• Increasingly ”winner takes all markets”
• High expectations for customer
experience
• Continuous market disruptions
• Cost pressure from global competition
• ”More with less”
• Sustainability, global warming, euro
crises, etc.

4. Key challenges for organizations
External
• Choosing the right direction/focus/problems
• Creating innovative solutions
Internal
• Engaging everyone in the organization to improve and
innovate effectively
• Creating alignment throughout the organization

5. Partial solutions
TRIZ
- Create innovative solutions to problems
- Find the right problems
- Predict the future direction of a market
Toyota Kata
- Engage everyone in the organization to improve in a systematic
way
- Create alignment throughout the organization
- Support and coach improvement efforts as part of the everyday
management system

6. Previous work
Toyota Kata Mike Rother, (Steven Spear)
TRIZ for IT and business problems Darrel Mann
TrenDNA techniques Darrel Mann and Yekta Özözer
Lean startup Eric Ries

7. Toyota – engaging employees in
improvement

8. “We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
- Aristoteles
Mike Rother
What does Toyota do
differently in every day
work and management
that explains their ability to
improve and align the
organization?
“The evolution of Lean”
Lean tools  processes  principles  habits and routines

9. What is a Kata?
Kata is a routine or repeating pattern for doing
something

10. Mentee
Improvement Kata Coaching Kata
Mentor
Toyota Kata
Philosophy:
• Continually improve as part of everyday work
• Align improvement to with shared vision and challenges
• Grow people and maximize human potential
Toyota Kata is two behavioral routines to realize these goals

11. The Improvement Kata
Next target condition
A good target
condition is about
one month away
1. Understand the direction
2. Understand the current condition
3. Define next target condition
4. Find route with PDCA experiments
5. Start over
PDCA experiment
1. Hypothesis
2. Experiment
3. Result
4. Learning
Find the route with
PDCA experiments
Current condition
Understand deeply
Vision
”North Star”
Challenge
Short iteration cycles Go and see Focus on learning

12. The Coaching Kata
The purpose of the Coaching Kata is to teach and coach the
Improvement Kata using real world problems as practice.
Teach/coach Support Alignment
Mentee
Improvement Kata Coaching Kata
Mentor

13. Improvement Kata challenges
• How to set the a meaningful vision?
• What is the right challenge?
• Understanding the current situation
in complex problems?
• Where to get ideas for experiments
for difficult problems?

14. TRIZ for IT and business problems 1/3
• TRIZ techniques customized for business
and IT problems by Darrel Mann
• Includes interesting examples
• Includes techniques for
• Understanding market evolution
• Defining and analyzing problems
• Generating solutions
Key take a ways
 Predicting market development
 Understanding perfection for stakeholders
 Analyzing complex problems
 Generating creative solutions

15. TRIZ for IT and business problems 2/3
40 inventive principles
with examples
The inventive principles offer patterns for designing innovative
solutions to problems. They are based on the patent database
and are documented with relevant examples to provoke ideas.
Conflict-contradiction
conversion template
The template offers a good visual representation for the
problem as a problem statement, conflict and contradiction.
Conflict matrix The conflict matrix documents the most likely inventive
principles to generate good solution for conflicts between
different attributes.
Where to innovate A useful template to categorize innovations for an industry and
discover good candidate areas for future innovation.
Function and
attribute analyses
FAA is proven technique to form an understanding of the
current state of a system by mapping its elements and their
interactions. FAA also helps to map both the positive and
negative intangibles of a system.

16. TRIZ for IT and business problems 3/3
Trends of evolution Systems evolve towards perfection through certain trends of evolution. By
mapping a systems current state regarding these trends it is possible to
discover areas where there is a lot of potential for improvement. Trends of
evolution can also be used to generate solution ideas.
Resources By mapping the available resources in a system it is possible to generate
solution ideas that rely on free and/or underutilized resources. Resources
can also act as a trigger for solutions. Recourses can also be intangible like
human cognitive biases.
Perception
mapping
Perception mapping is a good method for approaching complex problems
by mapping the network that the individual perceptions form and
identifying which perceptions hold key positions in that network and focus
improvement efforts to those areas.
System operator The system operator, also known as the nine windows, method helps to look
at the problem from different viewpoints regarding time (past, present,
future) and abstraction level (system, micro system, macro system) It is
very flexible and can be used to understand a problem, discover resources
and generate solutions.
Stakeholder ideal
final result
definition
This tool allows the mapping of what perfect looks for different stakeholder
groups regarding different attributes of the system (like speed, cost, etc.).
The results are documented in matrix where on dimension is formed by
stakeholders and the other by system attributes. The matrix is useful for
identifying contradictions.

17. TrenDNA techniques 1/2
• Techniques for understanding and predicting
the behavior of populations Darrel Mann and
Yekta Özözer
• Tools for designing product and service ideas
based on scientific understanding of intangibles
• Based on generational cycle theory (William
Straus and Neil Howe) and spiral dynamics
(Clare Graves)
Key take a ways
 Predicting consumer market evolution
 Understanding human intangibles
 Segmentation based on thinking styles and generations

18. TrenDNA techniques 2/2
Thinking styles By mapping the (potential) customers of a product/service it is
possible to identify user segments with distinct likes and dislikes.
This also a good way to discover contradictions between difference
thinking style preferences for a product/service.
List of challenges (table)
Generational
mapping
By mapping the (potential) customers into the generational
archetypes it is possible to gain insights into their intangible
preferences. This type of mapping will also reveal potential shifts in
preferences as the age boundaries of generations move due to
aging.
Functional world The functional world is a method of mapping the functions provided
by product/service. It is a 2 by 2 matrix with one dimension being
me/we and the other tangible/intangible. It is very useful for
discovering the intangible functions of the product/service.
Contradiction
resolving
provocations
18 strategies or provocations that help create innovative solutions to
resolve contradictions. They offer an interesting alternative for the
40 inventive principles for some situations (especially workshops).

19. Lean startup
A systematic approach to startups by Eric Ries
1. Document your hypothesis
2. Build a quick prototype
3. Learning – validation or update hypothesis
Key take a ways
 Very creative techniques for fast empirical
validation of complex ideas

20. The Continuous Innovation Model
The continuous innovation model combines the basic structure of Toyota Kata to
engage and align everyone effectively in innovation efforts and TRIZ techniques to
create a vision, understand the right challenges and create innovate solutions.
Create innovative solutions to problems
Find the right problems
Predict the future direction of a market
Solves challenges
 Engaging everyone in the organization to
improve and innovate effectively
 Creating alignment throughout the
organization
TRIZ
 Choosing the right
direction/focus/problems
 Creating innovative solutions
Toyota Kata
Engage everyone in the organization to improve
Create alignment throughout the organization
Support and coach improvement efforts
Lean startup – Quick experimentation and validation of innovative ideas

21. Continuous innovation model
Background
- Initially I started integrating TRIZ techniques to Toyota Kata “ad hoc”
- Last spring I did a more systematic integration analyses and some
experimentation
- I have only used TRIZ tools that I have personal experience with
Getting started
- Start with ”vanilla” Toyota Kata and integrate TRIZ tools on a pull basis
- Toyota Kata has established patter of introducing it to an organization
- Setting the vision and challenge happen relatively rarely and expert help is
an option to think about to get started better
- Building a strong coaching capability related to Toyota Kata and TRIZ is
critical
Remember the context
- The model was developed with IT and business problems in mind
- Every context is different – be open minded about what TRIZ tools to
integrate
- The model is only a starting point, TRIZ tools and ideas can be integrated
with Toyota Kata (and Lean) in very creative ways

22. Next target condition
1. Understand the direction
2. Understand the current condition
3. Define next target condition
4. Find route with PDCA experiments
5. Start over
Find the route with
PDCA experiments
Current condition
Vision
”North Star”
Challenge
Continuous innovation model - vision
Vision
• Stakeholder ideal final result definition
• Functional world

23. Continuous innovation model - challenge
Next target condition
1. Understand the direction
2. Understand the current condition
3. Define next target condition
4. Find route with PDCA experiments
5. Start over
Find the route with
PDCA experiments
Current condition
Vision
”North Star”
Challenge
Challenge
• Conflict-contradiction conversion template
• Where to innovate
• Functional world
• Trends of evolution
• Thinking styles
• Generational mapping
• Perception mapping

24. Continuous innovation model - current condition
Next target condition
1. Understand the direction
2. Understand the current condition
3. Define next target condition
4. Find route with PDCA experiments
5. Start over
Find the route with
PDCA experiments
Current condition
Vision
”North Star”
Challenge
Current condition
• System operator
• function and attribute analyses
• Perception mapping
• Resources

25. Continuous innovation model - current condition
Next target condition
1. Understand the direction
2. Understand the current condition
3. Define next target condition
4. Find route with PDCA experiments
5. Start over
Find the route with
PDCA experiments
Current condition
Vision
”North Star”
Challenge
Target condition
• Conflict-contradiction conversion template
• Changes to FAA model
• Changes to perception map

26. Continuous innovation model - current condition
Next target condition
1. Understand the direction
2. Understand the current condition
3. Define next target condition
4. Find route with PDCA experiments
5. Start over
Find the route with
PDCA experiments
Current condition
Vision
”North Star”
Challenge
PDCA experiments
• System operator,
• 40 inventive principles
• Conflict matrix
• Contradiction resolving provocations
• Lean startup techniques

27. ”Pros” ”Cons”
More creative and larger quantity of
improvement ideas
Adding TRIZ techniques and ideas to
Toyota Kata increases complexity
Systematic way of incorporating
intangible aspects to improvement
efforts
Requires coaches proficient in both
Toyota Kata and TRIZ
Offers (partial) solutions to many of the
pain points of traditional Toyota Kata
Counterintuitive for traditional
management thinkers

28. Summary – the continuous innovation model
The continuous innovation model combines the basic structure of Toyota Kata to
engage and align everyone effectively in innovation efforts and TRIZ techniques to
create a vision, understand the right challenges and create innovate solutions.
Solves problems
- Creating alignment throughout the organization
- Engaging everyone in the organization to improve and innovate effectively
- Choosing the right direction/focus/problems
- Creating innovative solutions
Experiences
- Initial experiences in small scale use have been promising
- Offers solutions the challenging aspects Toyota Kata
- Missing data from large scale implementations
Next steps
- Fine tune the model and write better documentation
- Gain data from large scale implementations, preferably compared to ”vanilla” Toyota
Kata
- Collaboration is more than welcome

29. The Continuous Innovation Model
The continuous innovation model combines the basic structure of Toyota Kata to
engage and align everyone effectively in innovation efforts and TRIZ techniques to
create a vision, understand the right challenges and create innovate solutions.
Create innovative solutions to problems
Find the right problems
Predict the future direction of a market
Solves challenges
 Engaging everyone in the organization to
improve and innovate effectively
 Creating alignment throughout the
organization
TRIZ
 Choosing the right
direction/focus/problems
 Creating innovative solutions
Toyota Kata
Engage everyone in the organization to improve
Create alignment throughout the organization
Support and coach improvement efforts
Lean startup – Quick experimentation and validation of innovative ideas