Knowledge and Continuous Innovation: The CIMA Supporting Methodology

Competition today is forcing companies to increase their effectiveness through exploiting synergy and learning in product innovation. Literature, however, is still mainly focused on how product development projects, seen largely as isolated efforts, should be organised and managed. This article proposes a model to describe and explain how companies can gain a substantive competitive advantage by extending their innovation efforts to other phases of the product life cycle and by facilitating knowledge transfer and learning both within the company and with other partner organisations. The model is based on collaborative research by the authors, based on their involvement in the Euro-Australian co-operation project CIMA (Euro-Australian co-operation centre for Continuous Improvement and innovation MAnagement).