Abstract

How can you leverage the relationships among technology, innovation, and quality to enhance your personal innovative potential -- releasing that creative spirit to actively pursue the quality ideal? The case studies shared in this article provide some ideas for how you can make it happen through deliberate, sustainable value creation. While innovation is a social process requiring collective knowledge and experience, technologies are inherently social products or outputs. Quality systems provide the glue to produce what is needed consistently, and to connect people with the innovations that will meet their needs. The relationships among technology, innovation and quality are based on creating new value and sustaining the ability to continue creating it in the future. There are two ways new value can be envisioned and created in a future context: peripheral knowledge and combinatory play. These approaches can be applied separately or together. The end result is the same, though: new insights, new ideas and new developments. The case studies discuss the development of breakthrough technologies in three-dimensional graphics, online innovation forums, web-enabled visual work instructions, haptic robotics, interactive art, and visually enhanced player piano performance.