Research Vision

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 (and/or service) – process – organisation – market combinations (PPOM) 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 the process is at least one, and in many case two or more new elements in existing PPOM-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, an particular country/society or an industry, a company or 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, continual learning (and unlearning), and deep insight into the process of continuous innovation.

Continuous innovation is an essentially cross-disciplinary field of research. Recognising that none of them can cover the field on their own, the CINet participants therefore see the network as a major vehicle for collaboration required for developing and furthering the area.

Research products

The research products of the CINet include:

• Fundamental knowledge on the process, organisation, management of Continuous Innovation;
• Translation of that knowledge into practical management theories; and,
• Research methods and tools.

The products are 'marketed' and disseminated through:

• Individual and joint publications in academic and practitioner journals.
• Conferences, workshops and seminars.
• Training programmes, including the CINet's own doctoral programme.
• Commercialised methods and tools.

Research process

Key characteristics of the research process are:

• Empirical, relevant, rigorous and robust, with the potential to make a genuine contribution to the ongoing development of theory, method and managerial practice.
• Collaborative, jointly with other participants in the CINet and together with companies.
• The products are realised as projects.