HIGH-INVOLVEMENT INNOVATION THROUGH CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

Continuous improvement (CI) in all aspects of the business is essentia l for meeting the challenge of today's turbulent environments. One inc reasingly popular strategy for enabling continuous improvement is thro ugh mobilising a high level of involvement of the workforce in sustain ed incremental problem-solving. Although the potential benefits of suc h high involvement innovation are considerable, implementing programme s of this kind is not easy. This paper reports on a five year research programme exploring implementation issues in CI and presents a framew ork model for the development of CI which draws upon extensive case st udy work. In particular it identifies a series of levels of CI perform ance and the blocks and enablers associated with them.