Purpose – Literature and practice highlight the need to stimulate processes of qualitative growth in SMEs. The aim of the research presented in this paper is to identify a type of benchmarking and a benchmarking tool which can support the qualitative growth of these companies....

The effective management of an innovation process is widely recognized as an important pre-requisite for organisations competing in the current business environment, irrespective of size. Although front-end activities have now long been recognized as crucial for successful new product...

The attention focused on the complex set of human activities through which a company attempts to create value for its stakeholders is one of the most characteristic features of the total quality management (TQM) concept. This focalisation on the concept of process in the field of competitive...

The growing importance and considerable prestige that quality awards hold have encouraged firms to adopt “excellence models” as evaluation frameworks for organisational self‐assessment. This has contributed to the spread of a specific form of self‐assessment logic: primarily, the search...

Purpose – The aim of this study is to investigate both the path taken by companies in order to survive in a competitive environment and the factors that have favoured or limited their development. Design/methodology/approach – The study was carried out using a retrospective approach....

Purpose – A large amount of research deals with the identification of management practices related to new product development (NPD) success. To this purpose, assessment tools capable of helping enterprises to set up improvement processes are of extreme importance. The aim of this paper is to...