What's in a name?

Gene Kania of mc2solutions wrote an article in the March 2008 issue of Visions entitled "Can we just stop calling it "Lean" Product Development?".

Click here to download a .pdf of the article.

So where does "lean" come from? According to this website, here's the origin of the term Lean in manufacturing:

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"The word "Lean" is a term coined by John Krafcik of MIT because it uses less of everything compared to mass production – half the human effort, half of the space, half the design hours, half the investment in tools, half the work in progress, and many fewer defects."
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In manufacturing, "Lean" is almost synonymous with Toyota, a relationship that does not exist in "Lean Product Development".

When Eli Goldratt was asked about Lean around 2000, he identified it strictly with the Toyota Production System. "You refer to the work of Taichi Ohno," Goldratt said when questioned about Lean vs. Theory of Constraints. One could argue that ANY lean production effort closely follows TPS with some variations. When talking about product development, one can not assume it contains a similarly dominant amount of Toyota genetics.

The processes used in product development seem much more a schmorgesbourg of tools and methods that just happen to share the same basic philosophies of lean production. To warp a Goldratt joke, it is a "peace loving" system. It takes a piece of six sigma, a piece of TPS, a piece of this and a piece of that. So lean product development suffers from not having a clean relationship with the "brand name" company that espouses it.

While it's not a good idea to blindly copy a company's best practices in either NPD or manufacturing, lean pd suffers from its looser Toyota heritage. It seemingly lacks that extra touch of retsin that comes with a de facto endorsement by one of the most envied and respected global brands.

So is the word "lean" in product development being used properly? Does it hurt or help? Is it just a term that helps market the idea, or does it espouse the principles identified by MIT's Krafcik as the soul of TPS? Does it even matter?