Quality and Innovation

I used to have a long, comprehensive description of all the things I wanted to do with this site. (You can still see it below.) My aspirations now are much more tame and manageable… I just want to reflect on any and all cool and boring topics I happen to be thinking about at the moment. Most of the time, my reflections will deal with quality and continuous improvement, because I think about those topics a lot. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about quality of life issues.

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Together, quality and innovation are critically important to managers. We’ve got to deliver high-quality products and services now, but if we don’t innovate, we die. Especially in trying financial times, figuring out how to balance quality and innovation elegantly is the holy grail for the sustainability of business.

As a result, the mission of this site is to do the following:

1. First and foremost, to make research results real in the domains of technology management, socio-technical systems, quality and innovation. There are tons of useful findings out there but they are buried in academic verbosity!
2. To describe issues and techniques associated with the management of quality and innovation, especially concerning how the topics relate to one another.
3. To explain quality concepts in new, different, or unconventional ways.
4. To examine current events and public policy through the lens of the quality management literature.

I’ve done #3 and #4 a lot more than the rest so far, but hope to spend more time on the others in Fall 2009.

Quality & Innovation is a project of Espresso Labs, edited by Nicole Radziwill (professional profile available on LinkedIn). Nicole is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University, active in the American Society for Quality, Chair of the ASQ Software Division until 2012, and has a PhD in Technology Management and Quality Systems from Indiana State University.

I am also part of the Königsberg line of the Radziwills.