Work organisation and innovation: Case study: Bombardier, Belgium

Bombardier Inc. is headquartered in Montréal, Canada and is structured around two businesses: aerospace and transportation. It has 76 production and engineering sites in more than 60 countries, and employs 65,400 people. At Bombardier in Bruges, workplace innovation is undertaken in two main ways. The first dimension of workplace innovation aims at improving process efficiency and product quality. The second dimension of workplace innovation, which is more specific to the site in Bruges, is teamwork, which was promoted by dramatically redesigning the work organisation at the production site. Teamwork was implemented to shorten communication lines, to increase the sense of ownership at the shopfloor level, to avoid disturbances in the production flow, and to enhance the problem-solving capacity on the shopfloor.