Title: Lean Six Sigma and innovation: comparison and relationship

Authors: Souraj Salah

Addresses: LSSMBB, Juma Al Majid Group Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Abstract: The success of an organisation is directly related to the effectiveness of its creation of innovative products or processes and its implementation of continuous improvement (CI) to improve such products or processes. For any manufacturing or service organisation, lean Six Sigma (LSS) and innovation are important approaches. Effective understanding of these methodologies and their relationship will provide an industry with a competitive advantage. Many industrial organisations today are using LSS as the core for their improvement efforts. Also, an increasing number of organisations are setting up programs to transform their culture into an innovative culture. There is a lot of dispute about how they relate to each other, what the common grounds are, as well as their differences. As such, the relationship between LSS and innovation, as well as the development of an integrated model for both, are worth further investigation.

Keywords: lean Six Sigma; LSS; innovation; quality; competition; integration; continuous improvement.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBEX.2017.087756

International Journal of Business Excellence, 2017 Vol.13 No.4, pp.479 - 493

Received: 30 Jun 2016
Accepted: 02 Sep 2016
Published online: 01 Nov 2017 *

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