Slop University's School of Continuous Improvement closes five years of work on a maturity model that now sets lease priority and terminal access for small traders scored against it.
The Commerce Continuity Maturity Model, five years in, now ties lease priority and terminal allocation to a stall's score
Five years of scoring small commerce culminate, in the School of Continuous Improvement’s newly published Impact Report 2021–2026, in a single instrument: a five-level maturity model, from Ad Hoc to Optimised, now used well beyond the research team that built it.
The Commerce Continuity Maturity Model began as a shared rubric for rostering continuity, payment-terminal uptime and record-keeping at food-court kiosks, strip-mall stores and food trucks across six partner precincts. It has since been adopted by transit authorities, a regulatory commission and a national logistics operator as a basis for lease priority, compliance-certificate renewal and loading-dock allocation — outcomes the instrument’s original design brief did not specify.
Five years ago we could tell you whether a stall was struggling. We can now tell you exactly which rung it’s struggling on, which is either the whole point of the School or a very elaborate way of saying the same thing.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas
“Every score in this report came from somewhere a stall’s rostering coordinator was already keeping the ledger by hand,” said Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer in the School of Continuous Improvement and the report’s lead author. “We just gave the ledger a name.”
The report situates the model within the School’s wider evaluation-ecosystem agenda, alongside new work on terminal-decline taxonomies and dashboard-driven inspection scheduling. The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jlu0rp.