Challenging EME's to learn through collaborative improvement projects

Continuous Improvement is a consolidated concept in theory and practice, mainly in the context of a single organisation. Within the increasingly turbulent and uncertain environment the concept of Continuous Improvement should be transferred and extended to the level of collaborative continuous improvement to understand the improvement and learning process that takes place at the inter-company level, leading to the concept of Collaborative Improvement. This paper presents a number of practical results of a three years EU-research project on improving learning and continuous collaborative improvement that takes place in inter-organisational processes, e.g. the context of an Extended Manufacturing Enterprise. Within this project an action research approach is adopted through a cycle of workshops at the EME level to facilitate the collaborative improvement process and stimulate the learning process at the inter-organisational level.