Does competitive pressure foster innovation? In addressing this important question, prior studies ignored a distinction between discrete innovation aiming at entirely new technology and continuous improvement consisting of numerous incremental improvements and modifications made upon the existing technology. This paper shows that distinguishing between these two types of innovation will lead to...

Efforts to incorporate the principles of continuous quality improvement (CQI) into health care have been underway for about ten years. In order to understand the lessons of this decade of experience, senior organizational leaders and experts in the field of health care were interviewed. This select group agreed that there have been concrete accomplishments: the tactic of assigning blame for mis...

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Purpose – On the metaphoric level, much as been written about complex adaptive systems (CAS) for implementing total quality management (TQM) and organizational learning (OL) in turbulent or unpredictable environments. The aim of this paper is to add practical insights on how a specific CAS-technique called genetic algorithms (GA) can be used for designing quality management systems for keeping ...

This article describes the use of continuous quality improvement (CQI) techniques, such as use of customer focus and the promotion of group interaction and problem solving, in an introductory nursing course. The use of CQI techniques resulted in satisfied students who met the course objectives.

Six Sigma is a customer focused continuous improvement strategy and discipline that minimizes defects. It is a philosophy to promote excellence in all business processes with aggressive target goals. Six Sigma is a five phase methodology for continuous improvement which uses a metric based on standard deviation. It is also a statistic which describes the amount of variation in a process. Six Si...

Overview and Motivation Rapid development of the telecommunication industry progressively introduces new and enhanced functionalities into existing software systems thus increasing the system size and complexity. The software systems of telecommunication equipment become very large software systems where high reliability requirements are even harder to reach. The most common project type for de...

Dysarthria refers to a group of motor speech disorders as the result of any neurological injury to the speech production system. Dysarthric speech is characterised by poor speech articulation, resulting in degradation in speech quality. Hence, it is important to correct or improve dysarthric speech so as to enable people having dysarthria to communicate better. The aim of this paper is to impro...

We examine the content of continuous improvement strategies and identify infrastructure decision areas that are important for continuous improvement initiatives. We present a framework of infrastructure based on the idea that continuous improvement can serve as a dynamic capability when it includes a comprehensive organizational context. Further, we study continuous improvement initiatives in f...