Six Sigma and innovation: can they coexist at the same manufacturer - Essay Example

This paper analyses whether the coexistence of Six Sigma and Innovation is possible or not. “Innovation is the introduction of something new; a new idea, method or device” (Innovation - What Is Innovation?). On the other hand, Six Sigma program believes that “a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. A Six Sigma defect is defined as anything outside of customer specifications” (What is six sigma?, 2010). Innovation is essential for current organizations to stay in the market.

There are two types of organizations in this world; leaders and followers. Leaders always look to develop new products and services whereas followers like to follow the concepts developed by the leaders. For example, touchscreen phone or iPhone was developed and introduced in the market for the first time by Apple. All the other mobile manufactures followed Apple by introducing their own versions of touchscreen phones. However no other organization did succeed as Apple did. The case of iPad is also not much different.

In short, innovation definitely gives competitive advantage to an organization. At the same time it should be noted that innovation requires lot of time, money and effort and therefore many of the organizations are reluctant in spending too much time, money or effort for developing new products and services. Such organizations will opt for less expensive followership. During the latter part of twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty first century, many new business management strategies were evolved as a result of the advancements in science and technology and the huge changes happened in the business world.

Six Sigma is one such business management strategy developed in 1986 by Motorola, one of the prominent microprocessor chip manufacturing company in the world. The core of six sigma business strategy is the improvement of