That said, there is increasing evidence that an over-reliance on planning, management and measurement in the front-end of innovation as evidenced by the movement of back-end processes such as lean and six sigma to the front end of innovation, are producing poor returns on innovation effort.

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The program--known as the clunky "At the Customer, For the Customer"--taps the parent company's wealth of expertise in the vaunted Six Sigma defect-reduction method, just-in-time manufacturing and such management pursuits as succession planning.

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