Concept for the Classification of Learning and Innovation Environments in Manufacturing

Innovation managers constantly seek to improve reliability, variability, and productivity in manufacturing systems. To enable this, continuous improvement constitutes a core innovation management process in manufacturing. Therefore, manufacturing units must be able to deal with complex and volatile environmental circumstances and at the same time act both exploratoryand exploitative to produce incremental and radical innovation. Learning and innovation environments take up the idea of developing and integrating innovation simultaneously to the operation of the manufacturing system. They provide protected physical or virtual environments enabling idea generation, testing, validation, and knowledge transfer. Hence, the different phases of the innovation process, from idea generation to innovation dissemination, require other development or learning environments. By dividing learning and innovation environments into different classes and assigning them to different phases of the innovation process, manufacturing companies can design innovation processes using suitable premises. Therefore, this paper aims to present an approach for the description and classification of different learning and innovation environments in manufacturing to support manufacturing companies in building up and utilizing suitable environments increasing the innovation process efficiency. In addition, appropriate methods and solutions are suggested to support the building and utilization of adequate learning and innovation environments. To summarize, this scientific contribution provides practitioners and scientists with a concept for classifying learning and innovation environments in manufacturing and sets out first suggestions for the utilization and implementation