Good morning, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am very happy to join you for this INNOVATION AND QUALITY CIRCLE (IQC) Awareness Seminar, jointly organised by the NTUC Productivity Development Department and the Productivity Standards Board. This is yet another collaborative effort of the NTUC and the PSB to generate mass awareness of Innovation and Quality Circles.
The first quality circle in Singapore was formed in 1973, in Bridgestone (S) Pte Ltd, a Japanese company manufacturing tyres. The then National Productivity Board (NPB) saw the value of QCs and invited Japanese experts to share their knowledge with us. In Japan, QCs were regarded as key pillars of their economic competitiveness.
The QC Movement in Singapore was subsequently kicked off in September 1981 along with the Singapore Productivity Movement. Then, the QCs were aimed at changing the workers’ work attitudes, building teamwork and improving productivity of their companies. A QC comprises a team of employees who meet regularly to brainstorm solutions to problems encountered in the work place. This involvement of workers’ participation has instilled interest, pride and ownership in work as well as fostered teamwork among the workers.
In the 90s, QCs helped to improve global competitiveness for the Singapore workforce. Our workers have embraced a quality mindset and an attitude of achieving excellence.
The result over the years from many companies shows that QCs are an effective tool and an excellent platform for harnessing productivity. Milestone after milestone was attained. QCs began as a tool for problem solving, evolved into productivity enhancement and then to the attainment of excellence in products, service and business.
In the New Economy, QCs must again be repositioned to create value for the companies. Against the backdrop of rapid technological advances, the new economy is knowledge and ideas driven. Challenges are multi-fold and multi-faceted. Thus, it has become important for QCs to move beyond quality improvement into becoming Innovation and Quality Circles.
The IQC movement was launched by the Prime Minister two years ago. Since then, it has become even more obvious why we need to go beyond quality and productivity into innovation. Let us take the example of a factory making typewriters. For as long as there was a market for typewriters, it made sense to improve the quality of the typewriters and achieve productivity gains in the factory. But today, typewriters are sidelined by workstations and networks. However excellent and productive the typewriter factory is, it will have to be closed down – unless it innovated and did something different.
In the New Economy, it is no longer good enough for a company or an economy to make the same things and provide the same services in the same way year after year, even if it is done productively. Consumers are increasingly demanding. They look for new and better things to buy. Technology keeps improving. Items that are top of the range one year may be totally outmoded the next year. We must not stay still. We must assume that every industry we work in will face a shift in demand away from us towards other suppliers who can meet the new and changing needs. Higher productivity in a sunset industry, it will only make the sun go down more slowly – it will not make the sun rise again.
In the new competition for economic growth, we can retain our edge only if we learn to innovate. Innovation is to do things in a different way that brings positive outcomes. It is more than thinking out of the box. We need to turn the box upside down and inside out to look for new ideas, processes and approaches. That will be the key to our future competitiveness.
In the World Competitiveness Report for 2001-2002, Singapore was ranked first in the world for productivity, and first in the world for union contributions to productivity. This shows that the unions and PSB have succeeded in inculcating a strong sense of productivity consciousness. We must maintain this.
But we still have some way to create a more innovative economy. In the same World Competitiveness Report, Singapore ranked only 13th in the world for innovative capacity. It is not for lack of promotion. In innovation policy, we were ranked 2nd, after the US. This reflects the tremendous amount of work that the Government and agencies like PSB have put in to push for greater innovation. But in the factories and workplaces, we are not generating as many new ideas compared with the US, Finland, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands that are at the top of the list.
I have seen some innovative ideas in the past few years, and I would like to share them with you. And I would also like to raise some questions from the examples that I hope will trigger some brainwaves from you as well.
In Japan, there is a company that makes alarm clocks. The purpose of an alarm clock is to wake people up. But can we use it to help people go to sleep? Well, the company did just that. It recently introduced a new alarm clock that also plays soothing music to help you relax and doze off. I read that it is selling very well. The question to ask is: What if we use our product to do something opposite to what it is made for? Something surprising and practical may pop out in the answer.
I visited Ikea in Sweden. The manager told me that the curtain cloth that Ikea sold was very popular. In the past, long queues would form when customers had to approach the staff to choose the material, and have them measured and cut. There would also be frequent arguments whether the staff had cut the correct length of cloth. Ikea innovated. First, they allowed the customers to take the cloth and cut it themselves. The customers would then bring the cloth to a weighing machine to be weighed, like how fruits and vegetables are sold in the supermarket. They didn’t have to measure the cloth again. End of long queues and quarrels over wrong lengths. So, another question to ask is: What if we did our work using a method found in another totally unrelated industry or setting? If it works for that industry, maybe it will work for yours too.
The third story is about Corning. Corning started as a company that made high quality glassware for the kitchen. It saw an opportunity to apply its knowledge in making glass to making fibre optic cables. Today, it has 40% of the world market in fibre optics, and is moving aggressively into the networking business. It has even sold off its original kitchenware business. From Corning, the question to ask is: What if we used our knowledge to make something totally unrelated to our own industry? That may be the cutting-edge technology that solves the other industry’s problems.
Conclusion
When we innovate, we not only grow our business. We can create a new business where none existed. That will increase the rate of growth even more. I hope this seminar will highlight for us the importance of innovation, and plant the seeds for many new business ideas to emerge in the coming years.
