Title: High-involvement innovation through continuous improvement

Authors: John Bessant, Sarah Caffyn

Addresses: Centre for Research in Innovation Management, University of Brighton, England, UK. Centre for Research in Innovation Management, University of Brighton, England, UK

Abstract: Continuous improvement (CI) in all aspects of the business is essential for meeting the challenge of today’s turbulent environments. One increasingly popular strategy for enabling continuous improvement is through mobilising a high level of involvement of the workforce in sustained incremental problem-solving. Although the potential benefits of such high involvement innovation are considerable, implementing programmes of this kind is not easy. This paper reports on a five year research programme exploring implementation issues in CI and presents a framework model for the development of CI which draws upon extensive case study work. In particular, it identifies a series of levels of CI performance and the blocks and enablers associated with them.

Keywords: continuous improvement; implementation; capability; behavioural routines.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTM.1997.001705

International Journal of Technology Management, 1997 Vol.14 No.1, pp.7-28

Published online: 17 Aug 2003 *

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