The Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc. (LEI) is a nonprofit research, education and publishing institute with the goal of making things better through Lean thinking and practice. Through co-learning partnerships with leading universities, companies and organizations across all sectors, and with an online community of 300,000+, we gather the best in Lean learning and share it with you.
LEI grew out of the MIT research team that was responsible for coining the term “lean production†to describe the revolutionary production and management system they identified at Toyota, as explained in the groundbreaking book The Machine That Changed the World (Womack, Jones, & Roos). Director of the research initiative, Dr. James P. Womack, established LEI in 1997 to share these principles and practices with the world. Today LEI is led by Josh Howell, who was an architect and implementer of a lean operating system for retail stores at Starbucks Coffee Company before joining LEI as a Senior Coach in 2013.
LEI is the proud cofounder and sponsor of the Lean Education Academic Network, Catalysis, the Lean Product and Process Development Network, and the Lean Global Network.
