“Manufacturing Process Innovation Typologies and

Antecedents

Ohm Pandejpong

Michigan State University

Motivations

• Interests on innovation from various fields: e.g., Economics, Sociology, Engineering, etc.

• Recent attention on process innovation.

• Heavy focus of both practitioners and researcher on small incremental programs: e.g. TQM, JIT, Six-sigma

Motivations (continued)

• The possibility of trading-off the benefits of incremental and radical improvements

• Are different types of innovations compatible

Definitions

• Wacker’s (2004) artificial terms• Garvin (1998) defines a process as a system

of activities that transform inputs to outputs.• Innovation is defined as implementation of

new ideas (Schroeder 1989, Galbraith 1982)• Implementation refers to the act of putting

something into effect (Merriam Webster Dictionary)

Definitions (continued)

• Manufacturing process innovation can be defined as an implementation of new ideas in a manufacturing process.

Different stages in innovation

• Invention := the process that turns ideas into something explicit (Hargadon’s (1998) definition of implementation)

• Integration: the process that causes an invention to become part of the system.

Classifications of Innovations

• Two dimensions of the classification system– Origin of invention

• Internal• External

– Degree of radicalness (Benner & Tushman 2002, 2003; March 1991)

• Incremental (Exploitative) • Radical (Explorative)

Classification (continued)

Incremental Radical 

External: New to the plant

Internal: New to

the world

Replication Appropriation

Exploitation Exploration

Origin of invention

Degree of Radicalness

Literature Review

• Potentially useful frameworks– Absorptive Capacity: Cohen & Levinthal 1990,

Zahra & George 2002– Learning Organization/Knowledge

Management: Tang (1998), Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995) and Leonard-Barton (1995)

– Organizational Ambidexterity (Duncan 1976; Tushman and O'Reilly 1996; Gibson and Birkinshaw 2004)

Lit. Review (continued)

• Product Innovation Literature– Rationales: - certain similarities

(Pisano 1997, Bender 2000)

• Practice-oriented Paradigms– TQM, Lean, Six-sigma, Reengineering

• (Benner and Tushman 2002; Benner and Tushman 2003), Subramaniam and Youndt (2005?)

• Product life cycle, process type, technological dynamism, and other contingencies – Burns and Stalker (1961), Abernathy & Utterback (1978)

Proposed framework

Antecedents:Opportunities identification , creation and selectionResource SlackProcess management orientationProcess technical knowledge integrationHuman capitalCulture of innovation

Innovation Capabilities:ReplicationAppropriationExploitationExploration

Manufacturing Performance

Proposed methodology

• Survey-based empirical research

Expected contribution

• Identify antecedents of innovations of various sorts

• Evaluate the compatibilities between different types of process innovation

• Explore the differential impacts of different types of process innovation on performance