DETERMINANTS OF QUALITY MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN STIMULATING PRODUCT AND PROCESS INNOVATIONS

Research highlights Quality Management System (QMS) has now become a recognizable guarantee of trust in certified business systems. A critical review of the literature reveals that empirical studies conducted to date have yielded conflicting findings on the relationship between quality management practices and innovation. This study empirically investigates how quality management principles may act as determinants of product and process innovations. The results show that customer focus and leadership explain a significant amount of product innovation, but not process innovation. Empirical support also finds that people management explains a significant amount of variance in both product innovation and process innovation. The findings highlight the importance of developing formal organisational mechanisms to measure levels of such quality determinants as they are easily overlooked or taken for granted. Moreover, firms need to recognise that innovation is a multi-faceted concept that can be controlled from a process or a product perspective, a distinction which is sometimes blurred.