Innovation and Quality: competition or completion?

For a product or service to survive and flourish, organizations must not only generate exciting and creative ideas, but also ensure that visible quality be built into the products and services and remain there for their entire life cycles. Quality is a technical attribute that refers to performance characteristics such as a product’s or a service’s reliability, maintainability, and durability. Innovation refers to the generation of new ideas and their implementation into new products, processes, and procedures. The aim of this presentation is twofold: to show the practical implications of a series of studies focused on balancing innovation and quality, and to expand the participants’ knowledge of the quality models most appropriate for transforming creative ideas into innovative products and services. I will suggest ways to reconcile the competition-completion dispute regarding quality and radical innovation by presenting conditions under which they can coexist.