No abstract

In many business sectors today, focus on quality as a competitive tool is being replaced by a focus on innovation. Research exploring connections between quality management, innovation, and company performance suggests that quality is 'necessary but insufficient' in business today. In short, managers need to know how to adapt their quality management practices to achieve innovation performance in addition to quality performance. West coast U.S. forest products manufacturers were surveyed about their quality management practices and performance with respect to both quality and innovation. Results were analyzed to identify two categories of high-performing firms: those achieving primarily quality outcomes and those achieving both quality and innovation outcomes. Executives from firms in each category were interviewed to provide detail on management practices. Results suggest firms must first change how they view innovation; firms that were primarily focused on quality rather than innovation viewed innovation as an end rather than the means to some other business goal. The most significant finding is related to how firms interact with customers-firms focused on innovation proactively seek to identify and meet customers' needs whereas quality-focused firms primarily emphasize reacting to customer complaints. Findings suggest several areas where managers can focus to improve innovation performance.

No abstract

No abstract

Project assignment, assigning a project to a project manager, is one of the organization's most strategically important decisions since it is a determinant of the project performance and the organizational performance. Despite its importance, project assignment is not well studied in the literature and it is performed intuitively in practice. By using concepts of case study research, this study explores project assignment processes in their real-life contexts. Then, the project assignment criteria obtained from the case studies are validated by a panel of experts, following the concepts of the Delphi method. In this paper, some of the research results are presented. In particular, we propose an integrated set of project assignment criteria, including some already proposed in the literature, and others that are new. As part of the criteria, we place a special emphasis on an integrated set of project managers' competencies that is applicable to the current multipleproject environments. In future research, we will use the criteria to build a model for project assignments. The conceptual outline of the model is presented.

Advances in supercomputers have come at a steady pace over the past 20 years. The next milestone is to build an Exascale computer however this requires not only speed improvement but also significant enhancements for energy efficiency and massive parallelism. This paper examines technological progress of supercomputer development to identify the innovative potential of three leading technology paths toward Exascale development: hybrid system, multicore system and manycore system. Performance measurement and rate of change calculation were made by Technology Forecasting using Data Envelopment Analysis (TFDEA.) The results indicate that the current level of technology and rate of progress can achieve Exascale performance between early 2021 and late 2022 as either hybrid systems or manycore systems.

Speaker modification is the ability to change the per ceived speaker identity of a recorded utterance. Basic to this is the capability to alter the vowel segments of speech. Not only do these segments comprise the majority of the voiced portion of speech but they are dominated by clearly defined acoustic parameters -for mant frequencies and pitch. A method of altering the formant frequencies of vowel segments using LPC anal ysis/synthesis was investigated. Pole location modifi cation based on statistical references provided individ ual control over formant frequencies and bandwidths but, in some transformations, lead to artifacts in the reconstructed speech.

The Toyota Prius was first introduced in 1997 and since then over 150 hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) have been brought to the automobile market around the world. This was spurred by a major interest in the future of vehicles using 'alternative fuel' for addressing environmental and fuel dependency concerns. Based upon previous work 1 , which identified an input-output model that could successfully explain the progress of HEV technologies, this study evaluates and compares the technological advancement observed in different HEV market segments over the past 15 years. The results indicate that the introduction of a wide range of midsize HEVs is posing a threat to the two-seaters and compact HEV segments while an SUV segment shows a fast adoption with a significant performance improvement. The rates of change for each segment are also provided to give insights into the estimation of the future performance levels for new product development target setting purposes.