Collaborative Improvement: Interplay but Not a Game

The thesis data have been collected in the EU-sponsored project: Collaborative Improvement Tool for the Extended Manufacturing Enterprise, CO-IMPROVE. In this project four universities (Denmark, Ireland, Italy, and The Netherlands), two software vendors (Greece and Sweden) and three companies (Denmark, Italy and The Netherlands) each with three to five suppliers were involved. The CO-IMPROVE project and the thesis is based on “action research” and “action learning”. The main aim of the whole project is through actual involvement and actions make the researchers, companies and selected suppliers learn how to improve operations in (hopefully) a win-win like manner through collaboration.