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.
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