Management of Process Innovation as an enabler for digitalization and sustainability
In the adoption of Woodward’s (1965) perspective on company behaviour, Barnett and Clark (1996) suggested that innovation in the process industries is primarily enabled by “process innovation” as the difficult and constraining aspect of product development. The importance of process innovation in the development of a corporate strategy was early recognized by Skinner (1974, 1978), and his position was underscored in an article titled “The shareholder’s delight: companies that achieve competitive advantage from process innovation” (Skinner, 1992, Skinner, 1996). The vital importance of a profound understanding of the production process for innovation in a process-industrial context has since been confirmed in many studies (Floyd, 2010, Frishammar et al., 2013, King, 2009, Lager et al., 2017).