Research Vision

Why – continuous innovation

The future wealth and well being of individuals, companies and society as a whole depend a great deal on continuous innovation. Successful continuous innovation leads to sustained high performance and requires organizations to combine, at the same time, all the time:

• Operational excellence: satisfying today’s stakeholders, including owners/shareholders, employees, customers and suppliers, and society as a whole.
• Innovation excellence: developing new products/services, processes, managerial and organizational systems and practices, and markets all the time, to satisfy tomorrow’s stakeholders.
• Strategic excellence: making the right strategic choices.

Achieving and sustaining continuous innovation excellence requires company-wide involvement and commitment, cross-departmental and inter-organizational collaboration, ongoing learning (and unlearning), and deep insight into the process of continuous innovation.
Continuous innovation is an essentially cross-disciplinary field of research. Recognizing that none of them can cover the field on their own, the CINet members see the network as a major vehicle for collaboration required for developing and furthering the area.

What – research products

The research products of the CINet include:

• Fundamental knowledge on the process, organization, management of continuous innovation.
• Translation of that knowledge into practical management theories.
• 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 programs, CINet's own PhD workshop, PhD seminar and young academics workshop.

How – 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.