Six Sigma and The Knowledge Based Economy

Here's a question, can one use Six Sigma in the context of an knowledge based economt? Does it even make sense? How one can apply Six Sigma to innovative research when the latter is 95% failure by nature?

A knowledgeable relative of mine has this answer:

The answer may be to applying the DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) cycles more frequently and at shorter intervals to generate more options. The number of iteration in effect will be defined as a metric of 'success.' This equivalent of a 'gear-shift' in DMAIC will rev up the innovation engine. In order for this to be feasible, a small, nimble team needs to be developed to address specific knowledge creation areas. Too big a team would slow the process, so one has to cherry pick the right people with the right skills. So a modified Six Sigma strategy may be needed for research than for production.

Another interesting take comes from Poppendieck who writes:

However, the most important process to streamline in a development project is the knowledge creating process. Whether we are developing a new product or a new software system, the fundamental thing we are doing is discovering what needs to be in the system in order to delight the customer. Lean thinking supports two basic disciplines for speeding up the knowledge creation process: short, frequent learning cycles and delayed commitment.

That is delayed commitment (analagous to late binding) has some interesting properties with regard to innovation:

In lean software development, scope is not set at the beginning; small features sets are added based on priority determined by their ROI. This tends to lead to a significant increase in both speed and productivity for a simple reason: most of the features we put into software systems are never going to be used. How can this be? When we freeze scope early, we encourage our customers, who don’t really know what they want, to ask for everything they can imagine. When we delay commitment on scope until we are well into the knowledge generating process, we end up reducing scope down to the minimum set that is really going to pay off.

Delayed commitment is only feasible if we consciously avoid making our processes and artifacts change-intolerant. The reasons Six Sigma works in practice is, that 90% of the work is execution, only 10% is knowledge creation. But if you can define a metric for the change-tolerance of both the process and the artifact, you may be able to leverage Six Sigma to facilitate the execution on every iteration. The goal is to prevent ossification of both process and artifact, thus ensuring agility throughout development.