MULTICASE STUDY OF CONTINUOUS INNOVATION IN THE COMPANY: EVOLUTION MODEL, STAGES, PILLARS AND RESULTS 

PRESENTED BY: MRS. YOLANDA BAUTISTA POVEDA
DIRECTED BY: PHD. D. JUAN ANTONIO MARÍN GARCÍA
                               PHD. D. JULIO JUAN GARCÍA SABATER

Abstract:

In an ever changing and global environment, it is necessary to provide quick and efficient responses to the challenges we face, it is essential to maintain competitive advantages in order to survive. Continuous improvement is part of all intangible assets that enables companies to meet or even anticipate changes and gain a competitive edge very difficult to copy because of the source of his nature, but also difficult to implement for the same reason. These intangible assets are based on complex behaviour that is not easy to acquire and measure.

This justifies the interest that continuous improvement has still nowadays; there are many known success examples, but also many companies fail when they try to implement these programs or if they are able to lunch them they can not keep the programs along the time.

The aim of this work is to revise the most important aspects when we try to implement continuous or innovation improvement in operations management to help companies to decide to implement it, ensuring its success and maintenance, and possibly contribute to the development of a theory in close connection with practice.

For this purpose we have carried out a deep literature review, mostly articles published in the last five years, although some appeared earlier and have been included due to their importance.

Then we have considered the study of four cases. Companies have been chosen because they are medium-sized companies leaders in their sector who have failed their first attempts of implementing an improvement program and they are currently at different stages of evolution. Including manufacturing companies as well as marketing and sales. These four different companies are discussed as two case studies and as a multi-case study.

The methodology used was participant observation, in two companies, which are considered most suitable for solving certain types of practical problems where the experiences of the participants are important and the context is crucial. The third company data has been obtained through interviews, questionnaires, document reviews and visits. The data of the last company have been obtained from a previous study by the director of this thesis.

It can be seen that this field is at an early stage of maturity and there is still no unit of measurement and method, although significant progress has been made since 2006 in terms of unit definition of the concept. But authors like Herzen and Boer suggest that there is  a need to refine and supplement the existing theoretical models and especially a lot of research to validate these models with qualitative studies. This thesis tries to check the effectiveness of the theory in real applications, synthesizing and supplementing it with regard to the pillars that support the process and the various stages of evolution, so it constitutes a guide for managers that could decide to implement these programs ensuring its success and maintenance.

Following the literature review we have produced a complete and more detailed table of the facilitators of continuous improvement. On the other hand we have done a major contribution to the theoretical model defined by Bessant, this explains the improvement as an evolution from a state of pre-improvement to a full acquisition of skills, and we define new relationships within this evolutionary model to help explain more directly the relationship between the development of certain abilities and achievements. Bessant only targets a range of abilities that are needed to improve but he does not define how they are related to each of the levels of development throughout the process of program development.

Through case studies we find that the pillars covered are appropriate and act as facilitators in the evolution of improvement processes. Its adequate application will be enough to achieve intermediate stages of evolution. But there is a discontinuity in the model from step three to step four, which requires a radical change in the organization to move forward. We propose a relationship of activation of the pillars along the different stages of development that help, in part, to overcome this discontinuity. A deeper study of the causes that produce this break and to know how to avoid it will allow the possibility of this theory release.