Companies often claim to value two things at once.
They want existing operations to become faster, cheaper and more reliable. At the same time, they want employees to develop new services, redesign customer experiences and challenge established ways of working.
The two ambitions are compatible in theory.
Inside organisations, however, they are frequently assigned to different teams, measured differently and forced to compete for the same limited time and resources.
New research from North-West University suggests that this separation may be preventing South African banks from fully connecting operational improvement with innovation.
Published in the International Journal of Lean Six Sigma, the study examined how continuous improvement and innovation thinking were used inside one large South African bank. Researchers interviewed 13 employees who were innovation champions and had practical exposure to innovation initiatives. Every participant was also trained to at least Green Belt level in Lean Six Sigma.
Their experiences revealed an organisation in which innovation was supported in principle, but not always embedded in the systems through which work was planned, measured and delivered.
Improving the Existing System Is Not the Same as Rethinking It
Continuous improvement focuses on refining what already exists.
Methods such as Lean Six Sigma help organisations identify waste, reduce errors, standardise processes and improve performance over time.
Innovation thinking serves a different purpose. It encourages employees to explore unmet customer needs, question whether an existing process should exist at all and develop new solutions rather than simply improving the current one.
Banks need both capabilities.
Continuous improvement protects reliability in an industry where errors can carry financial, regulatory and reputational consequences. Innovation allows banks to respond to changing customer expectations, new technologies and emerging competitors.
The difficulty arises when one capability becomes part of everyday operations while the other remains an occasional campaign or specialist activity.
Participants were generally more familiar with continuous-improvement tools than with formal innovation methods. Even employees exposed to both approaches struggled to explain how they should be combined within the same project.
Seven Barriers Kept the Two Approaches Apart
The researchers identified seven broad barriers to integration.
These included resistance to change, insufficient measurement and feedback, competing priorities, poor communication between teams, limited external collaboration, inadequate knowledge of innovation methods and the absence of a clear integration framework.
The numbers behind several themes were notable.
Eight of the 13 participants identified resistance to change as an obstacle. Six said weak communication between continuous-improvement and innovation teams contributed to the problem. Ten reported insufficient knowledge of how the two approaches should work together, while seven identified the absence of a formal framework.
These were not isolated training problems.
Together, they pointed to an organisational-design problem: employees were being encouraged to innovate without always receiving a shared method, protected time, visible executive sponsorship or a system for tracking what happened after an idea was implemented.
Innovation could therefore become additional work layered onto existing responsibilities rather than a recognised part of how the bank operated.
The Pressure of Immediate Delivery
One of the clearest tensions concerned time.
Participants described continuous-improvement activities as easier to incorporate into routine work because they were connected to identifiable operational problems. Innovation required more space for exploration, customer engagement, experimentation and collaboration.
Those activities were harder to defend when teams were already under pressure to meet immediate delivery targets.
The study found that operational demands and short-term priorities often displaced longer-term innovation work. Employees could be encouraged to generate ideas while still being evaluated primarily on their ability to maintain existing operations.
That creates a predictable incentive.
When innovation is praised publicly but receives no dedicated capacity, employees learn that it is optional. When operational delivery is measured every week but innovation benefits are not tracked after implementation, urgent work will continue to dominate important work.
Silos Can Produce Duplication
The separation between teams created another cost.
Participants said continuous-improvement and innovation teams could work on similar business problems without sufficient visibility into each other’s activities. This increased the risk of duplicated work and reduced opportunities to combine specialist capabilities.
The researchers proposed several practical responses.
These included creating cross-functional project teams, maintaining a central library of current and completed initiatives, involving customers throughout the project lifecycle and developing an integrated training programme.
They also recommended tracking benefits after implementation. Without reliable measures, organisations may struggle to demonstrate whether an initiative improved customer outcomes, reduced costs or justified further investment.
What Bank Leaders Can Change
The study suggests that integration cannot depend only on motivated employees.
Senior leaders must decide where the capability sits, how projects are prioritised and who remains accountable for converting ideas into measurable results.
Protected innovation time can prevent exploratory work from being continually displaced by immediate operational demands. Executive sponsorship can give cross-functional teams authority to work across departmental boundaries. A shared framework can help employees determine when to refine an existing process and when to reconsider the process entirely.
The research also points towards a wider lesson for South African service businesses.
Organisations do not become innovative because innovation appears in a strategy presentation. Innovation becomes credible when the organisation’s structures, incentives, skills and measurements make it possible.
One Bank Cannot Represent an Industry
The study examined a single South African bank and used a qualitative case-study design.
Its 13 participants were deliberately selected because they possessed experience in both innovation and continuous improvement. Their views cannot be treated as statistically representative of every employee or financial institution. The research also did not measure whether greater integration directly improved profitability, customer satisfaction or innovation performance.
Further research would need to test the proposed approach across additional banks, industries and countries.
The study nevertheless captures a common organisational contradiction.
Businesses often ask employees to improve today’s system while inventing tomorrow’s. Unless management connects those responsibilities through time, training, collaboration and accountability, one of them will remain secondary.
Usually, it is innovation.
Source Information
Study Title: Integrating continuous improvement and innovation thinking in the banking sector: a case study from South Africa
Authors: Yolandie Richards and Rojanette Coetzee
Journal: International Journal of Lean Six Sigma
Published: 3 February 2026
DOI: 10.1108/IJLSS-06-2025-0176
