A quality management approach to guide the executive management team through the product/service innovation process

Abstract

The innovation process has a considerable rate of failure, from 40% to 80%, depending on the experts consulted. This paper developed a quality management approach, to help Executive Management Teams to handle the innovation process in a better way, based on the problem-solving procedure and the application of quality tools and techniques. It includes three major phases: ‘External Environment Investigation’, ‘Strategic Decision Making’, ‘Innovation Project Execution’, and a series of steps are arranged to span across the approach in each phase. A case study is conducted to demonstrate how the quality management approach proposed in this research can be used as a guideline to drive the product and service innovation process. The ideas and benefits of the proposed approach are further discussed.

Keywords:

• total quality management
• innovation
• innovation process
• top management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.