Innovative change management in SMEs: beyond continuous improvement
Abstract
With increasing market pressure and fragmentation Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) must move beyond the change philosophy of Continuous Improvement (CI) and develop a culture of innovation. To find out if SMEs could go beyond CI to achieve effective business innovation as a change management philosophy, a literature survey and a research survey on 15 SMEs was conducted to provide additional relevant information. The main research findings were: the SMEs exhibited a range of Continuous Improvement and innovation characteristics – some had adopted a culture of Continuous Improvement, while others had not; the SMEs which had adopted a culture of Continuous Improvement found that it could provide a solid foundation on which to build a culture of effective business innovation; and these SMEs were found to have embraced all the different components of innovation, as measured, more readily than those SMEs which did not have a culture of Continuous Improvement.
Keywords
Citation
McAdam, R., Stevenson, P. and Armstrong, G. (2000), "Innovative change management in SMEs: beyond continuous improvement", Logistics Information Management, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 138-149. https://doi.org/10.1108/09576050010326538
Publisher
:MCB UP Ltd
Copyright © 2000, MCB UP Limited