Lean Production in Times of New Competition: An Outline for Research in India

Lean production or the Japanese model of industrial production as a state-of-the-art organizational innovation has been heavily researched in the Western countries with respect to the development of the car industry. However, in the Indian context despite the fact that the automobile industry has been strategically promoted to be an engine of industrial growth, and despite the growth in business school education, there has been no academic work on how this organizational innovation has been introduced and adopted in the Indian manufacturing firms. In this paper, we address this question and outline a research strategy in this regard