Quality and innovation: A conceptual model of their interaction

After a long debate, it is widely accepted that Japanese success is based on the binomial quality and innovation. In the first part, the paper analyzes the close relations existing between quality and innovation and proposes a conceptual model able to explain both their strong correlation and their dynamic nature. The second part concerns the ways in which an enterprise can implement the conceptual model and presents concurrent engineering and lean production as two methodologies able to give essence to the quality and innovation aspects.