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During the 1990s a growing number of firms have been encouraging continuous improvement (CI) in all aspects of working life, and some impressive results have been achieved. However, the process of implementing CI is long and challenging. Companies need to know what progress they have made, and the outcome of any interventions, in order to consolidate and further develop CI. The CIRCA CI self‐assessment tool is a research‐based tool which helps users to make an objective assessment of CI in their company. It is designed to be used by any organisation regardless of size, industry, length of time working with CI, and the particular approach taken. The tool went through several phases of development, culminating in a paper‐based Version 3.0 in 1997. Since then further development and testing of the tool has taken place in the UK and abroad, and future plans include an electronic version.

Competition today is forcing companies to increase their effectiveness through exploiting synergy and learning in product innovation. Literature, however, is still mainly focused on how product development projects, seen largely as isolated efforts, should be organised and managed. This article proposes a model to describe and explain how companies can gain a substantive competitive advantage by extending their innovation efforts to other phases of the product life cycle and by facilitating knowledge transfer and learning both within the company and with other partner organisations. The model is based on collaborative research by the authors, based on their involvement in the Euro‐Australian co‐operation project CIMA (Euro‐Australian co‐operation centre for Continuous Improvement and innovation MAnagement).