Toshio Horikiri, one of the leading world experts of the Toyota Production System and currently managing director of the Toyota Management Institute, for the first time in Italy, explains the secrets of innovation. “There are basically two models of innovation, incremental and radical. Incremental innovation progressively and continuously adds features and functionality to existing products to keep them on the market. An example is the progressive enrichment of the equipment of safety devices that Toyota supplies on its vehicles and which changes the way of driving (social impact).
Radical innovation, on the other hand, creates a sharp discontinuity with respect to previous paradigms, also in terms of performance. An example is certainly the hybrid car (Prius) which has revolutionized the car market and driving habits in a mature sector. Many companies – continues Horikiri – apply only one model of innovation, while Toyota's success stems from the strategy of applying both”. Horikiri, who played a central role in the development of Toyota in South-East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Formosa and China, spoke today in Brescia on the occasion of the conference "Innovation and action: growing what is not yet known” organized by the consultancy firms Vitale Novello Zane & Co. and Considi.
Horikiri underlined how technology is an essential driver for doing and staying in business. “Toyota today considers Artificial Intelligence among the most promising technologies with the greatest future social impact. Artificial intelligence is the main driver for evolving production sites towards 4.0 and at the same time innovating the cars of the future. In fact, for Toyota innovation is not only that of the product that customers can see and touch but also innovation of the production process. In this sense, by 2025 Toyota expects to have completed the Industrialization 4.0 project which envisages the widespread application of technologies currently under development such as: IoT (Internet of Things); Fully Automated Visual Inspection System; Asset Digitization; Real Time Control and 3D printing”.
If the massive use of technology could suggest a downsizing of man's contribution, Toyota instead raises awareness that new skills will be needed to manage the factories of the future: "Professional skills that will have to be created and cultivated within the company organization because specific and not easily purchasable externally” specified the Japanese manager, before concluding with a reflection also addressed to SMEs, which characterize the Italian productive fabric. “Even in apparently traditional sectors, new technologies count. Taking advantage of new technologies is a normal way of doing business for any company of any size. Large companies find it difficult to cover the growing needs of all market segments, especially the innovative and small ones. These factors represent a great opportunity for SMEs that will be able to be innovative by exploiting the flexibility and speed that characterize them".
The conference organized by Vitale Novello Zane & Co. and Considi, companies that have developed a strategic partnership in the belief that the company is the essential and central subject for the development, not only economic, of the country, was opened by the economist Marco Vitale, president of Vitale Novello Zane & Co. “The foundations of Toyota's spectacular increase in productivity are well explained in a very lucid and limpid booklet dated 1978 by Taiichi Ohno, unanimously considered the father of the so-called Toyota production system, (translated and published in Italian only fifteen years later, in 1993) entitled “The Toyota spirit”. Many of Toyota's techniques and methodologies have become common heritage and represent the gift that Japanese management has made to the world's management culture, an enduring gift that is rightly placed on the same level as those of Taylor and Ford.
The entrepreneur Giacomo Gnutti, at the helm of the Fidelitas Group specialized in security, surveillance and transport of valuables, also spoke on the importance and need to innovate continuously. “ Investing in innovation is fundamental for Fidelitas: from 2012 to 2015 we practically doubled our investment in technologies. Investments in technological systems, infrastructures, vehicles represent a great effort every year aimed at the constant industrialization and refinement of production and logistics processes, both to improve in terms of competitiveness and efficiency of services.
Marco Bonometti, president of AIB, concluded by pointing the finger at bureaucracy: "Unfortunately, Italy is structurally a country that is very little oriented towards the Toyota Production System approach: just think of the incidence of bureaucracy which accounts for 4% on the turnover of SMEs. Bureaucracy is not only expensive, but it kills the spirit of enterprise and more often than not ends up protecting inefficient companies, which pass the major costs on to consumers. The world has changed and competitiveness comes from the continuous development of the ability to be able to innovate and at the same time be able to see waste where it was not perceived before".
