Continuous Innovation

The future wealth and well-being of individuals, companies and society as a whole depends a great deal on continuous innovation. Continuous innovation is the ongoing process aimed at creating product - market - technology - organisation - combinations (PMTO) that are new to an individual, a group of people, an organisation, a market sector or even society as a whole. This definition suggests four key elements:

• Innovation is a process and should be managed as such.
• The outcome of this process is at least one new element in existing PMTO-combinations.
• The extent to which the resulting innovation is new may range from incremental, small step innovation, through synthetic innovation, i.e. the creative recombination of existing techniques, ideas or methods, to discontinuous, radical, quantum-leap innovation.
• The entity or ‘the who' for which the innovation is new may range from the world, a particular country/society or an industry, a company to an individual.

Successful continuous innovation is beneficial to a wide variety of stakeholders, including customers, employees and owners/shareholders of companies. The achievement of such benefits requires company-wide involvement and commitment, cross-departmental and inter-organisational collaboration, ongoing learning (and unlearning), and deep insight into the process of continuous innovation. Continuous innovation is an essentially cross-disciplinary field of research.

Center for Industrial Production, Aalborg University