By YURI KAGEYAMA
AP Business Writer
YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP) _ Aiming to get an edge on its rivals in an intensely competitive industry, Japanese automaker Nissan says it’s attempting to foster a corporate culture that will produce manufacturing innovations in leaps and bounds instead of steady incremental improvement.
Its discussion of that effort is partly a swipe at bigger competitor Toyota Motor Corp. which for decades has favored the concept of “kaizen” or fine-tuning and bit-by-bit progress in auto manufacturing.
Kaizen has earned Japanese automakers good marks for reliability and quality and Toyota practically defined it as its “way,” emphasizing daily effort by everyone from the lowest assembly worker to the chief executive. But Nissan Motor Co. says it is implementing novel manufacturing methods and has dozens of ideas in its development pipeline.
“The old-style kaizen gives you a 5 percent, maybe a 10 percent, improvement. But our team’s goal is what we c
