The process of incremental improvement, especially, in manufacturing has been widely discussed and many companies have come to see continuous improvement as vital in today’s business. By now continuous improvement is a consolidated concept within managerial theory and practice, which keeps coming into focus as an important management area. Nevertheless, as indicated by Boer and Gertsen (2003), there are still interesting challenges which need to be addressed in future research in the area of continuous improvement. One of the challenges is that more processual research is needed in the firm belief that the effectiveness of
managing any process, including continuous improvement, depends a great deal on deep knowledge and understanding of that process (Boer and Gertsen, 2003).
A second important challenge was that continuous improvement is no longer restricted to intra-firm processes but increasingly to inter-firm processes as well (Boer and Gertsen, 2003; Boer et al., 2000). Because of the new imperatives of competition between companies, moving increasingly from the level of the single firms to that of networks of companies, there is an increasing advocacy and need to extend and transfer the concept of continuous improvement to inter-firm processes as well. However, as outlined in this research, there is still a
substantially lack of empirical grounded contributions on the concept of collaborative improvement.