Stealing a Page from Eli Whitney’s Playbook – Part 2 of a 2 Part Series

SCENE TWO

Eli Whitney would show up again in the annals of history with another innovation that would revolutionize the modern industries. This time Whitney would turn his attention to the manufacturing of guns.  As the need for inexpensive but reliable firearms grew, he saw the potential for mass production using interchangeable parts. He demonstrated this concept in 1798 with the production of 10 muskets. He ably showed the interchangeable aspects of the gun in front of the US congress by assembling and disassembling the guns from a pile of gun parts and randomly selecting the parts for assembly. This culminated in an order from the US military for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets at a price of $13.40 each.

Until Whitney’s time, guns from stock to barrel were made entirely by hand, by craftsmen one at a time who cut, filed, polished and fitted them properly. The great quality and dependence on skilled labor made them expensive and time consuming to manufacture. As a result, parts of one gun did not fit another one. The spare parts for each gun were made on an “as-needed” basis essentially the same way — handmade one at a time.

Drawing on a concept developed by Honore Blanc in France, Whitney set out to make all the parts of the guns identical so that they were interchangeable.  This idea was a serious departure from the conventional wisdom on firearm manufacturing. Whitney designed a rifle and created a template for each part of the rifle. Metal parts were cut, formed, or machined using the template. Towards this end, he invented many machines for cutting, milling, drilling, grinding, etc., which would transform the manufacturing industry.

Whitney re-invented the American manufacturing system by questioning the conventional wisdom of dependence on talented or gifted craftsmen. As a result, he faced opposition from trade guilds who promoted the specialized hand craft industry. Whitney’s objective was to create a system and process that could produce standard and interchangeable parts in a few weeks with semi-skilled persons. He was on a journey to create a process that was repeatable, scalable and systematic.  Although the production of his first order was late due to schedule overrun, he achieved success and planted the seeds for the industrial revolution led by Henry Ford and others.

Lesson #3: Process Innovation can revolutionize the way we work.  Eli Whitney was a pioneer in process innovation.  While his first innovation was a product innovation (Cotton Gin), his significant contribution came in the form of behind-the-scenes process innovation that changed the course for American industry.  Towards this end, he banged his head against the concrete walls of the prevailing paradigms of the guild system. But he dared to ask the questions many of us are afraid to ask: “Can this be done in a completely different way?” and “Can the job-to-be-done be achieved in some better way?”

Lesson #4: We need a process for everything including innovation if we want it to be repeatable, sustainable and scalable. The existing guild system was proud of the high quality of the firearms made by the highly skilled craftsmen. This is the equivalent of today’s over-dependence on a few gifted or talented “innovation athletes.” Today, more and more companies are finding that if the results of innovation and growth activities are to become repeatable, scalable and predictable, then we must create processes and systems to enable it, and not just depend on a few gifted people. Of course, over-reliance on processes and systems can limit innovation since it can force us to stay with existing paradigms when it would be more appropriate to search for alternate paradigms. On the other hand, using no processes and systems is a recipe for dependence on chance and luck. 

Final Thoughts: Convergence – It’s not improvement or innovation, but rather it’s about the integration and convergence of improvement and innovation.  Since Eli Whitney’s time, we have made major progress in manufacturing and production.  Many of his principles paved the foundations for Lean, Six Sigma and Innovation thinking.  Looking back at the years of progress, what we find is that waste elimination, variation reduction and innovation are all integral to making progress. Therefore, convergence and integrative thinking are essential. For more on this topic, you might be interested in reading David Silverstein’s thoughts about convergence and integrative thinking.

Comments

[Dan]

This is an excellent analogy of where we are today with the idea of knowledge tangibility. Today, human social, creative, and intellectual capital is crafted and hidden within corporations. Like custom craftsmen or like all the banks issuing a different currency against "custom" deposits.

The Ingenesist Project is an open source economic development program that specifies 3 relatively simple web applications which would allow human knowledge to become tangible outside of the organizational construct of a corporation.

These applications are as follows:

1. The knowledge Inventory

2. The Percentile Search Engine

3. The Innovation Bank

Innovation Economics is the modern day equivalent of Eli’s musket.

Many people have a deep sense that something very new, something very exciting, and something hugely lucrative is coming down the road as Web 2.0 converges to Web 3.0. Our hope is that we can capture it in our communities before it passes us by and becomes “Incorporated” in the old business model.

If we work together, Innovation Economics can be the best way to capture the engine of wealth creation and distribution for ourselves and our communities.

http://www.ingenesist.com