Collaborative improvement: What do we know? Where do we need to go?

Although especially through research performed across the CINet community, a lot of theoretical and practical knowledge has been developed on intra-firm continuous improvement, there is still a substantial lack of empirically grounded contributions and theories on collaborative improvement (CoI), that is, CI in an inter-organizational setting. The so-called CO-IMPROVE project investigated whether and how the concept of CI can be extended and transferred to inter-organizational processes. The objective of the paper is to evaluate the research findings in view of existing theories on CI. Thus, the paper actually presents an attempt to find out about the similarities and differences of extant CI theory to CoI settings by assessing what is specific for CoI, what for CI, and where theories on the two areas of application meet and overlap.

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