Proposal of a Deliberate Discovery-Learning Approach to Building Exploration Capabilities in a Manufacturing Organization

Many manufacturing organizations in developed countries need to be proficient in not only incremental improvements but also radical innovations. Radical innovations largely depend on exploration capabilities, in other words capabilities of searching, discovering, and developing radically new systems, processes, and operational practices. Since many manufacturing organizations are proficient in incremental improvements, an important challenge for them is to develop the exploration capabilities across the organizations. However, little knowledge has been accumulated as to how to develop such capabilities in practice. The main purpose of this paper is to propose an approach to building organization’s exploration capabilities. In the approach, the capabilities are built through leaders iteratively and deliberately creating situations where groups in an organization have to or can be more explorative. The approach is made by analogy from how organizational changes toward lean manufacturing were driven by an experienced lean consultant. In addition, this paper presents a model of how to practically apply the approach at companies. The model is developed firstly based on existing theories then modified through employing the model at a manufacturing company.