Research Group Improving Business

Improving Business, led by professor Ton van Kollenburg, studies the use of continuous improvement strategies like Lean Management and Six Sigma in organisations.

Starting points are the way organisations shape their processes in relationship with their changing environments and how they use continuous improvement in doing so. Research questions of the research group are in a general sense:

  • To what extent are current processes controlled from a multi-stakeholder perspective and thus able to deliver sustainable results and how can continuous improvement support this?
  • Organisations are supposed to survive faster going changes in the surroundings, but for which changes is this true?
  • Are organisations that implement continuous improvement changing to ‘real lean’-organisations or are they fake (with only some lean visuals and rituals)?
  • A lot of organisations achieve major results using continuous improvement programmes and strategies, but are they able to sustain these results over a long period of time and how can they achieve this?