The Lean Analytics Association (LAA) is a non-profit organization that aims to inspire companies to transform their innovation process by implementing lean thinking.
Founded in 2012 as a spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), LAA aims to enable practitioners to:
In 2009 a consortium of 12 European partners kicked-off the four-year Lean Product and Process Development (LeanPPD) project. The consortium included partners from 6 companies, 2 research institutions and 4 universities. The project aim was to develop a new model that would address the industrial need for a comprehensive set of lean methods, design techniques, and tools to go beyond lean manufacturing focusing on applying lean thinking in the product development process.
Lean product development is lean approach that addresses the traditional product development challenges such as need for more innovate solutions, high development costs, long production cycle times and others. Lean product development aims to create re-usable knowledge, use teams of responsible experts and visualization to achieve better and faster results.
Towards the end of the project the EU commission suggested the LeanPPD consortium to identify potential ways to further disseminate the projects’ outcomes after its completion. EPFL’s team proposed the idea of establishing a non-profit association that would drive the research further, disseminate the lean product development philosophy beyond the LeanPPD consortium, and exploit the findings, results and outcomes. As a result, the Lean Analytics Association was founded in Lausanne in 2012.
The below figure provides a quick overview of the Lean Analytics Association’s timeline revealing several vital milestones achieved from the beginning of the LeanPPD project up to 2016.
Since its launch in 2012, LAA continuously drives the lean innovation research, shares best practices, exchanges the latest developments, experiences, challenges, success stories and more. LAA encourages lean experts, practitioners and organizations from around the world to network, learn, and share their knowledge and experience within the Lean Innovation Community.
To find out more about the Lean Analytics Association (LAA), visit our new website at www.lean-analytics.org.
