To become reacquainted with the fundamentals on how quality and innovation work in tandem and understanding how these powers must be harnessed together, it’s helpful to occasionally look back at where we’ve been and where we’re headed.
Last year in this column, I wrote about the innovation leader’s job from a team perspective. Now let’s focus on three personal attributes for innovation leaders: entrepreneurship, being an explorer and the ability to move fast....
When you think about how to steer your career, it’s important not to steer too hard. Life presents many opportunities, and if you are trying to force your way through, you will miss the opportunities that come your way...
The work of the quality profession has evolved over the years from quality control to quality assurance to quality management. But what is the next stage of evolution from quality management.
The spikes in knowledge that have occurred throughout history all have leaders associated with them. The myth that surrounds these leaders is they all were lone geniuses. In truth, the most famous leaders worked with teams of highly skilled people...
There is a core set of tools from which innovators can choose. Generally, innovators should select one primary tool and perhaps one secondary tool to use in each stage of the innovation process...
3-D printing is one of the most exciting new technologies since the transistor of the last century, and since the steam engine two centuries before that...
We are currently in a perfect storm for global change. The global marketplace is changing and advances with technology are dramatically changing the way we complete even the simplest tasks. We are responding to change by innovating....
In last year’s July issue of QP, I wrote about what a career in innovation might look like. In this column, I want to provide you with some ways to get there...
In a previous Innovation Imperative column, I wrote that, in short, innovation is a risky business. In this month’s column, I am going to move beyond identifying the nature of the risks we must address and look at how we manage those risks...
I bought a copy of the Scientific American and skimmed through the articles during my flight until I came to Michael Webber’s, “How to Make the Food System More Energy Efficient.” He had my attention...
Last year, the ASQ Quality Management Division’s Innovation and Value Creation Technical Committee conducted its first evaluation of ASQ readiness for innovation certification.
Open market innovation intrigues people because it appears to run counter to accepted business practices. It discounts secrecy, recognizes we lack knowledge in our own organizations and depends on ideas from outside for success....
Many people say that mentioning standards and innovation in the same breath is a contradiction in terms. Evidence from the real world says otherwise...
A quality manager’s career is far from predictable. It depends on the attitude of an organization’s leadership toward quality and, perhaps more importantly, leadership’s understanding of what quality is....
Innovation can provide solutions to many social problems, but it can also be the cause of those problems. The financial sector is a good example of an area in which both sides of the social responsibility coin are evident....