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In today's globally competitive market where the speed of change is increasing it is of great importance that manufacturing companies are striving to achieve improvements in their production systems resulting in competitive edge. One way of doing this is to strive for radical change by becoming more innovative. Today however, there's a lack of modern methods guiding companies to be not only innovative and creative in their production development process, but also increasingly more innovative while using it. Hence, the objective of this paper is to present and discuss a preliminary first draft of a Kaikaku realization method, primarily based upon Concept Modelling and research within the domains of Operations Management and Strategy, Innovation theory and Change theory. The result is a sequential work process that provides guidance from an initial “current state” of production to a more desirable “future state” based upon an aggressive target that is set in line with the production strategy. Finally, future research is discussed, implying that more research should be subjected to the actual work process as well as the main support provided in the process - aggressive target setting and facilitation of innovative thinking.

Considering today’s increasing speed of change, radical and innovative improvement - Kaikaku, is a necessity parallel to continuous incremental improvement - Kaizen, especially for SME’s in order to attain the competitive edge needed to be profitable. During 2011, a qualitative single case study with the objective of realizing a kaikaku in production has been conducted. The case study was run as a one year project using a collaborative approach including both researchers and company representatives. The case study was conducted with the purpose of gaining further knowledge about kaikaku realization as well as its implications. The empirical results provide insights about the great productivity results achieved by applying a specific kaikaku realization approach. However, it also sheds light on the difficulty and contradiction of combining innovation management and production system development.