Corporate capability management: Collective intelligence in use for improvement on a company's sustainability, innovativeness and competiveness

Despite of proven immense impact on short-term profitability, short payback periods, serving as a multiplier for performance enhancements or by annual cost-savings and being recognized for its significance on the innovativeness and competiveness of a company, successful continuous improvement (CI) as defined in the paper is rare. An approach with prerequisites of a successful exception is the Fraunhofer Austria Corporate Capability Management (CCM) concept. CCM is defined as the systematic and holistic approach to ongoing improvements on organization's capabilities in order to efficiently enhance a company's sustainability, innovativeness and competitiveness. The concept comprehends discrepancies between research findings on critical success factors and contemporary industrial practices. The paper demonstrates that a gap between best practices and the actual implementation in companies is present. It concludes that the CCM concept addresses potentials for cost-savings, increased innovativeness and sustainability even left out by advanced CI practices.