PurposeThis paper aims to explore the lean production paradigm as promoter of workers' creativity and thinking potential, and recognize this human potential as a fundamental asset for companies' growth and success, being a major factor to face the disturbing and unpredictable needs of current markets, providing companies with the necessary agility. The authors believe these thinkers are the base for an agile company and learning organization.Design/methodology/approachThe objectives were achieved through a deep literature review, starting with the Toyota production system (TPS) origins. Some industrial lean case studies were also explored to show that the adoption of a lean culture promotes a pro‐active attitude and behavior that are so important for companies nowadays.FindingsThis paper explores the association between lean production and the promotion of thinkers. For a long period, and even nowadays, it is common to consider the worker as just another production factor that the companies explore to obtain the maximum utilization. This was a result from the distorted knowledge of the Taylor principles and the Ford assembly line model, seeing the worker as a gear in the “big machine”. Lean production was seen, for many years and by many authors, as an extension of this Taylorist/Fordist model but this paper highlights lean production as a work organization model where the worker assumes a position of thinker, continuously looking for improvement and continuously looking for wastes. By reducing wastes, the company will be prepared to accommodate changes and will attain agility.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper is mainly based on literature review and on some industrial case studies of lean implementations (recent or just a few years ago); a deep research is necessary on the cause‐effect relation between lean production adoption and promotion of thinkers.Practical implicationsHelping companies to recognize the importance of workers as thinkers will have relevant impacts through the reduction of waste and costs, improving quality and increase productivity and revenue. Also, for workers, this recognition means respect, self‐esteem and confidence, and, essentially, more satisfaction with work.Social implicationsWith lean production and agility, better products will quickly reach society, contributing thus to clients' satisfaction. Also, lean companies' CEO and workers looking for wastes will lead to a reduction of energy consumption, raw materials needs and gas emissions (reducing pollution of air, land and water), producing only what is needed. Being satisfied with their work they will be happier contributing to the raising of the country's happiness.Originality/valueThe authors are not aware of similar research. The paper is meant for those who are interested in improving their companies' operations and workers' relationships.

The global industrial landscape has deeply changed over the last few years and the Industry 4.0 concept has emerged, being enabled by successive disruptive innovations and technological development that have transformed manufacturing processes. This concept is being pointed out as the fourth industrial revolution that embraces a set of new technologies that are shaping the future manufacturing vision. However, Lean Production is a widely used manufacturing approach that brings several benefits to organizations. Despite the integration between Industry 4.0 and Lean Production is being researched in the recent years, the impacts that result from the implementation of new technologies in established lean practices is not clear. The purpose of this study that consists in a systematic literature review is assessing how these emerging disruptive technologies can enhance lean practices and analyse their impacts and benefits for organizations that are moving towards this new industrial paradigm.

This paper explores the extent to which students and teachers are able to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of a shift in the approach to teaching and learning from a traditional, teacher-centred perspective towards project-and learner-centred education. It reports on a case study aimed at exploring students' and teachers' perceptions of a project-led education course carried out at an engineering course at a Portuguese university. Data were collected through questionnaires, letters and interviews. Findings suggest, in spite of some negative experiences and final results for some of the students, a clear recognition of the benefits of a project-based approach to both the teaching staff as well as the students. Both are able to identify interdisciplinarity, high student motivation and the acquisition of soft skills as key features of project-led education.

a b s t r a c tThis paper presents a new line of project based learning in the School of Engineering of University of Minho: the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Integrated Project (IEIP). Four groups, each one composed of students from different engineering integrated master courses -Mechanical, Industrial Electronics and Computers, Polymer, Industrial Management -compete against each other in developing or improving commercial products manufactured by actual industries. There have been so far five editions of the IEIP, with five different companies and five diverse products, however, all these products included components that required knowledge from all the engineering courses involved. Only with the cooperation between the students of the various courses that compose each multidisciplinary team, the success is attainable. As each student has to deal with various engineering scopes, students' technical skills are greatly enlarged and they acquire a multidisciplinary knowledge that was not possible in another way. Their soft skills like project management, teamwork, communication ability and personal development, which are valuable requisites for their future employers, are also improved. The participating industries also take advantage of the project: the groups competing against each other act as a multiskilled work force, actually making proposals capable of improving their products, their efficiency, and reducing costs.

The negative impacts or disadvantages of LPS implementations reviewed may result from the misunderstanding of the Lean principles. Possibly, they also happen due to partial Lean implementations (when only one or two tools were implemented) that may be effective in a specific work context but not suitable to all possible situations as the principles of LPS should not lead, by definition, to any of the reported drawbacks in terms of workplace ergonomics.

Purpose Even though the implementation of lean in health care environments is relatively recent, it has been receiving a lot of attention in recent years. Partly because of the fact that it is a recent field of practise and research and partly because the number of works developed in this field has grown rapidly, it is important to frequently update the perspectives on this field of investigation. Thus, this study aims to review the implementation of lean tools and techniques applied to hospital organizational areas in a five-year period, between 2014 and 2018, complementing some of the most relevant reviews already published. The most important criteria such as tools, methods and principles, hospital areas intervened, improvements and difficulties were assessed and quantified. Design/methodology/approach As starting point for this systematic literature review (SLR), a set of selected pre-existing review publications was used to support the current study and as the ground base for the expansion of the studies about lean health care. The current study contemplated 114 articles from a five-year period between 2014 and 2018. A subset of 58 of these articles was critically assessed to understand the application of lean tools and methods in different hospital areas. Findings The thorough analysis of selected articles show a lack of works in continuous improvement approaches when compared to the application of production organization methods, visual management and diagnosing and problem-solving tools. The reported improvement results demonstrate alignment with the principles and foundations of lean philosophy, but such results are presented in isolated initiatives and without robust evidence of long-term maintenance. Moreover, this study shows an evolution in the number of articles referring to lean implementation in hospital areas, but in its great majority, such articles report isolated implementations in different areas, not spreading those for the global organization. Thus, some of the main recommendations are the need to implement studies on complete flows of patients, drugs and materials, instead of isolated initiatives and strive to promote the cultural change of hospitals through structural changes, following new visions and strategic objectives, supported by real models of continuous structural and sustained improvement. Originality/value The current study develops a new perspective of the articles published under the thematic of lean health care, published in a recent period of five years, which are not completely covered by other works. Additionally, it explicitly applied, in an innovative way, an approach that used a set of previous reviews as the starting point for this SLR. In this way, it integrates approaches and categories from different SLRs, creating a framework of analysis that can be used by future researchers. Finally, it shows the most recent implementations of lean health care, exposing the current trends, improvements and also the main gaps.

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