المستخلص: |
Quality and innovation are distinct specialized disciplines with their own development history, expertise, specialists, and methodologies. In both areas the modern professional approach dates back to the early years of the 1900's. Achievements and success of the both disciplines were based on the influence of strong and intentional experts and organizations. A personal creativity of individual inventors has always played a prominent role in the field of innovation. Quality means the degree to fulfill someone's needs and expectations. Organizations compete with each other by the quality of their products (goods and services). In order to be successful, organizations must be responsive to changing market situations and strive for distinctively outstanding and excellent products in an efficient way. In quality management this has been solved through applying continual improvement methodologies. This has lead to innovations in the products and business processes of organizations. Hence, innovation is not any new subject in the quality discipline but it has inherently been in professional quality practices already decades. The word innovation widely appeared in the quality discussions sometimes about ten years ago. Then this concept also got an increasing importance in national quality initiatives, especially represented by the performance excellence models (quality award criteria) and the future of quality studies, and in the quality management standardization, especially in the ISO 9004 standard.
|