Collaboration Enhances Innovation

Teaming and collaboration at Boeing Rocketdyne have resulted in a supportive environment that has enhanced innovation. Collaboration allows for better, more innovative designs, a better understanding of the manufacturing processes by the design team, and for process integration to occur at an earlier phase of the product development cycle. It also helps new teams to better understand what other teams have explored in their creation of new product designs. Cross-company teams provide diversity of culture, knowledge, tools, and processes that provide a different outlook on problems, which results in superior solutions. Collaboration creates less rework and allows for better understanding of manufacturing processes. Shared knowledge of needs, best practices, and the existing state of the art provide a stimulus to spur innovation. Collaborative process development programs, jointly funded by government and industry team partners, have led to many breakthroughs at Boeing Rocketdyne. According to Carman, the varying priorities, the combined experience base, and talent pools and company focus on different product lifecycle elements act just like a stock portfolio to develop better solutions and lower risk.

However, outside of collaborative efforts on program or process teams, no specific or formal collaborative efforts exist at Boeing Rocketdyne. Therefore, Boeing Rocketdyne realizes mostly evolutionary innovation. In fact, most process or product innovation in Boeing Rocketdyne is so highly technical that it demands collaboration. These circumstances enhance the sharing of information and experiences. Examples include process organization leadership meetings to identify and discuss technical issues, share issues among recognized experts with Boeing Rocketdyne’s technical fellowship program, and communicate the experiences of recognized experts to design teams for consideration. Boeing Rocketdyne’s RS-68 Main Combustion Chamber achieved high quality at low cost because of extensive use of virtual project collaboration during its design.