Best practices in quality management for achieving quality and innovation performance

In many business sectors today, focus on quality as a competitive tool has been replaced by a focus on innovation. Does this suggest that quality is dead? Or can quality management systems be adapted to lead to innovation performance in addition to quality performance? Research exploring the quality-innovation connection suggests that quality is necessary but insufficient in todays business environment. Thus, while quality is certainly not dead, long-term success, however, depends on firms abilities to innovate as well. Thus it is not a case of managing for quality or innovation but quality and innovation. But are these two goals complementary? Several possible tradeoffs between quality and innovation have been proposed. For example, quality management focuses on incremental improvement and satisfying existing customers, in other words doing things better. Innovation is doing things differently - emphasizing breakthrough improvement and focusing on acquiring new customers. However, researchers have found strong linkages between product quality and process innovation, but only weak connections between product quality and product innovation. This paper reports on results of recent case studies of the quality management practices of firms in the forest industry. Best practices will be reported for firms that are successfully achieving innovation goals via traditional quality tools and techniques.