Characterization of Continuous Innovation for Technical Products in the Usage Phase

Globalization, digitalization, and climate change have created a highly complex, dynamic, and competitive market environment. In addition, heterogeneous and short-term changing customer needs even within the product life cycle require a change of the innovation approach. To address these challenges, continuous innovation has become increasingly important. It supports to overcome the shortening of product life cycles, minimizes the need for effort-intensive development for new products and thus contributes to sustainability. Although the importance of continuous innovation for technical products in the usage phase has already been recognized, there is no comprehensive and sufficient understanding of this approach. Existing definitions fail to provide a detailed and holistic description of the innovation characteristics and features. Consequently, manufacturing companies face difficulties in the operational implementation of continuous innovation. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a unified and systematic characterization of continuous innovation for technical products in the usage phase. The definition is based on the five dimensions of innovation content, innovation subject, innovation intensity, innovation process and innovation stakeholders as well as their respective characteristics. The resulting unified and systematic characterizing definition of continuous innovation supports manufacturing companies in the design of their specific approach of continuous innovation and its operative implementation.