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New ideas and innovations are the key to ongoing future success for companies. Many idea generating tools exist in the marketplace. It is of paramount importance to integrate and monitor innovation within a lean company process. Ideas without execution are merely dreams with low likelihood that they will come to fruition. We have identified two main strategies can be highlighted to generate innovations. One strategy is to “think out of the box” and find new markets without having an actual product (development to occur after the market is identified). This is more of a process. The second - more product oriented - is a antilogy strategy which is very complex and breaks the product down to the real physics to define contradictions and resolve them. Here you start with product development and then try to find a market. In both cases there are many new ideas generated in brainstorming sessions.

Several factors influence a company working culture including its industry, its geographical region, as well as the cultural and the educational background of its employees. Despite these, Japanese companies have successfully transferred a company’s working culture from Japan to other countries [2], so that only minor regional differences in productivity remain. Such transfer is possible with a strong process oriented mind set and working style. This paper examines the change in a working culture associated with the prototyping of exhaust systems in India. That change required a shift from a reactive “firefighting” mode of working to a structured, projectable and reliable working environment. The goal was to achieve increased in-time delivery, higher quality, greater flexibility, more innovation and reduced cost. The same process approach may be transferred from India to other parts of the world, while allowing for country-specific influences on a company’s working culture.