Agility and Guardrails: What Toyota Learned

Oct 17, 2024

Can constraints actually boost agility? In this short video, MIT research scientist Nick van der Meulen shares lessons from Toyota.

The conventional wisdom is that policy overload can weigh large corporations down with bureaucratic red tape and that agility is the wheelhouse of the startup. It has never been more critical that large companies innovate, however. As Nick van der Meulen, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, has studied innovation at large companies like Allstate, Mars, and Toyota, his research has surfaced an interesting paradox: Corporate constraints can actually accelerate innovation.

In this brief video, van der Meulen shares examples of how Toyota Connected North America uses guardrails to main its startuplike agility and provides tips on how this strategy can be implemented at your organization.

For additional details on how guardrails can help your company innovate at speed, read the full article by van der Meulen, “The Four Guardrails That Enable Agility.”

Nick van der Meulen is a research scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR).

Leslie Brokaw is a contributing editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

M. Shawn Read is the multimedia editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

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