Are quality and innovation management conflicting activities

By Nuria López-Mielgo, José Manuel Montes-Peón, Camilo Vazquez-Ordas. 2009

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is commonplace to assert that hard components of quality management inhibit innovation. In fact, the relationship between these two activities (quality and innovation management) is complex and, as claimed in this paper, bi-directional. Some recent works suggest that innovative companies are used to change management and therefore would find adopting quality management routines less demanding and less expensive than non-innovative companies. This paper builds on this view and proposes that innovation capabilities linked to certain valuable resources (better conditions) favor the implementation of hard components of total quality management. Innovation capabilities are key dynamic capabilities accumulated over time. In order to capture their complexities, they are modeled in a broad manner including both product and process innovations, as well as R&D and high technological level. For verifying the hypotheses, a random-effect probit model is tested on a large multi-industry panel of Spanish firms. Unobservable individual heterogeneity and time effects are controlled with this approach, which means a noteworthy improvement over previous research. The results strongly confirm the positive link between innovation capabilities and quality management. It is also demonstrated that some resources of the firm facilitate standardization and quality control activities. These findings have important managerial implications. On the one hand, developing innovation capabilities will permit companies to be proactive in the adoption of standardized management systems. On the other hand, quality and innovation departments should cooperate in order to ease the standardization of new products and processes.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e004ce1f26c7b36eb66538477e10475588f2529

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management Information Systems

1. S. Roper
2. J. Bourke

In Strategy and Management

1. J. Sanchis-Llopis
2. Alfonso Expósito
3. S. Roper
4. J. Bourke
5. J. Love

Citations in the corpus

• Innovation and business performance for Spanish SMEs: New evidence from a multi-dimensional approach (2018, background): “Similarly, studies such as that by López-Mielgo et al. (2009) and Saunila (2016b) point out that innovative firms possess greater capability to identify, assimilate and apply knowledge more easily throughout the firm.”
• Innovation, quality management and learning: Short-term and longer-term effects (2017, background): “Soft quality management promotes the more human and developmental aspects of the quality system allowing the firm to adapt to its changing environment and promoting continuous improvement (López-Mielgo et al., 2009).”
• Effects of Innovation Types on Firm Performance (2011, unknown): “Moreover, López-Mielgo et al. (2009) reported that especially process innovations exert a positive influence on the total quality management efforts of the organizations.”