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Best manufacturing practices: What do the best‐performing companies do?

Purpose – Research on best practices suffers from some fundamental problems. The problem addressed in the article is that authors tend to postulate, rather than show, the practices they address to be best – whether these practices do indeed produce best performance is often not investigated.Design/methodology/approach – This article assumes that the best performing companies must be the ones deploying the best practices. In order to find out what are those practices, the highest performing companies in the 2002 International Manufacturing Strategy Survey database were identified, and the role 14 practices play in these companies was investigated.Findings – Process focus, pull production, equipment productivity and environmental compatibility appear to qualify as best practices. Quality management and ICT may have been best practice previously, but lost that status. E‐business, new product development (NPD), supplier strategy and outsourcing are relatively new, cannot yet be qualified as, but may develop i...

Continuous innovation: towards a paradoxical, ambidextrous combination of exploration and exploitation

The Continuous Innovation Network (CINet) is a global network studying the innovation processes through which the synergistic combination between exploratory and exploitatory activities fosters a synergistic combination of operational effectiveness and strategic flexibility – allowing firms to achieve superior performance. This paper presents the theoretical field of continuous innovation as an extension of the intersection of three research streams – namely exploration-exploitation, organisational ambidexterity and paradoxical thinking. Moreover, it presents four papers from the International CINet Conference held in Zurich (CH), from the 5th to the 7th of September 2010.

CI Implementation: An Empirical Test of the CI Maturity Model

There are a number of tools available for organizations wishing to measure and subsequently develop Continuous Improvement (CI). In this article, we review and evaluate a well-accepted CI development model, namely the CI Maturity Model (Bessant and Caffyn, 1997), against data collected from the 2nd Continuous Improvement Network Survey and a number of empirical cases described in the literature. While the CI Maturity Model suggests that CI maturation ought to be a linear process, the findings in this article suggest that there are feasible alternatives for companies to develop CI capability.

Human Resource Management for Continuous Improvement

This paper investigates the relationship between HRM practices and Continuous Improvement (CI) activities in order to gain an understanding of how the HRM function may be utilized to improve CI implementation success, and consequently, company performance. The paper begins with a brief review of the HRM and CI literature and then presents statistical analyses of data collected from the Continuous Improvement Network Survey (2003), which demonstrate that HRM has a significant effect on CI behaviour and company performance, with the strongest relationship between HRM, CI and performance occurring when companies align their CI activities with their strategic objectives and use systems, procedures and processes to measure the results of their CI activities.

The Implementation of Best Practices: Process and Performance Effects

Much has been written about best practices and world class manufacturing in recent years. Various practices and improvement programmes have been suggested as best practices, assuming that their adoption would to lead to higher performance. The implementation process of these practices is, however, often neglected in the literature and, hence, relatively poorly understood. The purpose of this article is to provide insight into that process and how different implementation approaches influence performance. An analysis of the implementation of a range of manufacturing action programmes in two companies showed that a broad and incremental implementation approach initially leads to reduced performance followed by a gradual improvement as larger parts of the programmes are institutionalized. A ‘big bang’ implementation approach does not seem to lead to deterioration in performance.

Continuous innovative practises and operational performance

Most contributions in the fields of strategic management, operations strategy, organisation and innovation theory, do not provide knowledge on how to pursue the combination of exploration and exploitation excellence. This paper investigates the impact of change initiatives in high performance companies, and the effects of organisational formalisation and centralisation on the time and timeliness performance of new product development projects. We analyse data collected through two multinational surveys of manufacturing companies and case studies of two manufacturing companies. The findings indicate that companies with a high degree of improvement in exploitation and exploration performance differ from low performers in terms of the width and depth of the implementation of improvement activities. Furthermore, high performers are actively aware of configurational effects. Formalisation does not only lead to a longer lead-time of radical innovation but also, contrary to what theory suggests, of incremental innovations. Centralisation only affects the timeliness of NPD projects.

Open innovation: on the influence of internal and external collaboration on degree of newness

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the effect of internal and external collaboration on the degree of newness (incremental/radical) in innovation projects. This adds to the understanding of the particular patterns of open innovation (OI) and what characterizes the innovation emerging through this approach. Design/methodology/approach Tests are performed on the effect of internal and external collaboration on the degree of newness (incremental/radical) in innovation projects. This adds to the understanding of the particular patterns of OI and what characterizes the innovation emerging through this approach. The empirical analysis is based on a data set including responses from 512 Danish engineers. Findings The results show that external collaboration has significantly different effects on the degree of newness depending on the type of external partners involved, and they also show that radical innovation output is positively related to involving the R&D department (internal) and universities (external involvement) and negatively related to involving suppliers. Originality/value The results provide a more detailed understanding of how different OI patterns affect the development of incremental vs radical innovation in existing organizations. In particular, three findings add new insights into how OI affects innovation to reach the highest degree of newness: high importance of collaboration with external partners with distinct interests and skills; low reliance on existing customers and suppliers for the development of radical innovation; and narrow and focused internal involvement rather than broad internal involvement.

Advances in Production Management Systems. Value Networks: Innovation, Technologies, and Management

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International IFIP WG 5.7 Conference on Advances in Production Management Systems, APMS 2011, held in Stavanger, Norway, in September 2011. The 66 revised and extended full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 124 papers presented at the conference. The papers are organized in 3 parts: production process, supply chain management, and strategy. They represent the breadth and complexity of topics in operations management, ranging from optimization and use of technology, management of organizations and networks, to sustainable production and globalization. The authors use a broad range of methodological approaches spanning from grounded theory and qualitative methods, via a broad set of statistical methods to modeling and simulation techniques.

Collaborative Innovation: Internal and External Involvement in New Product Development

Industry and academia alike are increasingly becoming aware of the fact that innovation does not take place in isolated cells or functions within the firm. During the last the years the term open innovation has emphasized the importance of internal and external collaboration in order to increase the competitiveness of companies. Although the idea of involving internal and external actors in the new product development (NPD) process is not new, the knowledge about the benefits and pitfalls is still limited. This paper aims to contribute to refining the concept of open innovation, by investigating how strategic priorities influence the degree of external and internal involvement in the NPD process, moderated by contextual factors.

The influence of strategic entrepreneurship on the outcome of innovation projects

In light of the increasing need for innovation facing businesses in a complex marketplace, the construct of strategic entrepreneurship is attracting considerable attention. It calls for the integration of the seemingly opposing logics of strategic advantage-seeking and entrepreneurial opportunity-seeking behaviours. Based on a sample of responses from 512 Danish engineers, the present study explores whether the integration of the two is empirically valid and, if so, how such a construct affects the innovative outcome generated. Contrary to our initial hypothesis, the findings suggest that firms that are successful in carrying out radical innovation are driven by intended strategic decisions that enable them to exploit radical innovation within the existing organisational framework while also developing and transforming the original firm. The result lends empirical support to the integrative logic behind the concept of strategic entrepreneurship and demonstrates that radical innovation is best created and exploited on the basis of an explicit strategic intent.