Deloitte’s Global Manufacturing Industry group and the U.S. Council on Competitiveness just released the 2010 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index, a report based on surveys of hundreds of chief executive officers and other senior management at manufacturing organizations across the globe.
The study’s key finding? The factor most critical to driving global manufacturing competitiveness is access to talented workers capable of supporting innovation. A manufacturer’s ability to attract and retain talented scientists, engineers, and production workers ranked well ahead of traditional factors associated with competitive manufacturing such as materials and labor costs, energy policies, regulatory systems, or trade, financial and tax systems.
For those of us in the business of espousing, supporting and driving sustainable innovation, the report’s finding comes as no surprise. What is surprising is how many organizations fail to fully leverage their single greatest competitive advantage: their innovation workers.
We work with manufacturing leaders around the world, and have found three key elements to maximizing the effectiveness of an innovation workforce:
Empower innovation workers with knowledge.
On a daily basis, your engineers, scientists, researchers and other innovation workers, must tackle complex product development challenges. Innovation thrives when innovation workers have access to both the knowledge required to solve the problem and the innovation tools to help them apply that knowledge. Internal knowledge such as lessons learned help avoid reinventing the wheel or repeating the same costly mistakes. External knowledge — such as patents and web-based technical documents – provides fresh perspectives, spurs creative thinking and provides insights outside of your domain. Traditional methods for disseminating internal knowledge and accessing external content are insufficient. And, while knowledge access is critical, it falls short if innovation workers are not also equipped with a comprehensive platform for problem identification, analysis and resolution.
Provide a framework for collaboration.
Much of the critical institutional knowledge is not well documented, but instead resides in the minds of the employees. As employees tackle new innovation challenges, they struggle with identifying and leveraging the right subject matter experts. It is essential to provide a collaboration framework allowing the connection of people to people based on what they know and in the context of the innovation challenges at hand.
Give innovation workers the tools they need to perform innovation activities.
Companies need to invest in providing their workers with the right innovation software, tools and skills for innovation success. By arming your engineers and scientists with tools to help them focus their problem solving and speed problem resolution – all the while leveraging internal and external knowledge and sharing and exchanging this knowledge with their peers – innovation and product delivery are accelerated and worker productivity is enhanced.
You have invested in enterprise software across every facet of your business and individual productivity tools across nearly every discipline – yet engineers and scientists are still solving problems and generating ideas in the same ad-hoc way they have for decades. Empower your innovation workers with knowledge (innovation intelligence), tools to help automate and facilitate innovation activities and the ability to collaborate with others to tackle problems and find solutions and you will come a long way to maximizing your single greatest asset and source of competitive differentiation, your people.
These are the keys to building a successful innovation engine that I’ve seen from our customers – what are your thoughts?
Posted by Mark Atkins 
