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Toyota spends more than US$9 billion in 2009 on Research and Development, making the car maker the worlds number 1 spender on R&D. According to international management consultancy Bonz and Company in their Global Innovation 1000 report (2009), investment in innovation and improvement was the central theme in corporate strategy of many global corporations. The automotive industry was the big spender on Research and Development, with Toyota leading the way, followed by GM (5th), Ford (8th), Honda (16th) and Volkswagen (17th).

Various students of management and production theory will be aware of the Japanese practice of Kaizen.

Kaizen is a philosophy or method which when translated into English means something like continuous improvement or gradual continuous improvement of a way of life, a way of life could be a system or a technique or a value chain or to apply to humans as some prophets of self improvement do - the gradual improvement of one person’s life.

It is a philosophy that seeks to empower and foster the evolution of peak performance, higher quality and perfection in a system.

To make Kaizen work, the practitioner must take a birds view of a system and breaks all down into subsystems (the system being the sum of all its parts). By incremental improvements in each sub-system through the elimination of the review of process and assumptions connected with the process and through the identification of problems areas which cause damage or waste and identification of areas that can be tweaked for improvement or eliminated altogether, this leads to incremental improvements in the whole system.

The Kaizen process/method consists of five elements:
These are:
1. Teamwork
2. Personal Discipline
3. Improved Morale
4. Quality Circles
5. Suggestions for Improvements

Through the application of the Kaizen method, waste is eliminated, inefficiency is eliminated and standardization to maintain the level of quality is created.

When adhered to over a period of time, all these improvements will have a compound effect, producing results that should the push the practitioner ahead in terms of quality compared to others who do not practice Kaizen.

In industry, Toyota has been the highest profile practitioner of the Kaizen philosophy which is one of the underlying tenets of it much studied Toyota Production System.
The Toyota Production System which Toyota calls its way of making things, is also referred to as a ‘lean manufacturing system’ or a ‘Just-in-Time (JIT) system,’ and consists of philosophies and methods all geared towards enhancing the total production system of Toyota.

According to the Toyota website: ‘This production control system has been established based on many years of continuous improvements, with the objective of "making the vehicles ordered by customers in the quickest and most efficient way, in order to deliver the vehicles as quickly as possible."
Remember many years of ‘continuous’ improvement.

Kaizen when used at Toyota, all people from CEO’s to Janitors can participate in kaizen.
At Toyota, Kaizen usually involves an individual and his/her small group improving their particular area, keeping in mind the whole value chain. So for the group, if they were working at their area and someone suggests a better way of doing things which could improve quality, reduce waste etc, they get the chance to apply it but supervised by a line supervisor whose key role often is to supervise the Kaizen process.

Then the Kaizen methodology is applied which involves making changes and monitoring results, then adjusting. Thus instead of the old model where someone says do this, do this and calls for the overhaul of a system - with Kaizen constant never ending smaller experiments are carried out, results are monitored and if all is well and quality is improved in the system, these experiments become the practice until replaced, as the slow and steady process of Kaizen moves on. Over time, the constant improvements in the system delivers massive results.