Not all innovation has to produce sexy products that create some sort of techno-fetish lust (disclaimer : I’m typing this on an Apple MacBook Pro…). Innovation at the process level has the potential to return significant value, as detailed in an article in the Feb issue of Fast Company about how Abbott – a medical devices manufacturer – sped up the process to develop new ideas for stents:

The researchers didn’t want to lose themselves and their work in the bureaucracy of a big organization like Abbott, so their lab remained in Santa Clara, California, far away from Abbott’s Chicago-area headquarters. To speed up research, they reorganized the assembly-line process and connected the designers’ computers directly to lasers to cut the lag time between design and manufacturing. Abbott ultimately slashed the time it took to make a new design from months to weeks, then to just one day; to date, the company has designed and manufactured some 300 different iterations of Absorb. By reducing the time it took to design, “we didn’t need the first one to be right,” Capek says. “We can have one or two failures and still beat our schedule.” He hopes to roll out this production process to other areas within Abbott.