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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effectiveness of a quality improvement method in driving innovation in the public sector. The study expands on the concept of innovation and analyses the types and usefulness of the innovations observed.

The study utilizes an action research approach. The aim of the quality improvement method introduced is to generate innovations enhancing efficiency. An interventionist research method is required to produce the findings. Data collection methods include a preliminary question sheet, interview, workshops, observation and the examination of other material concerning the case organization.

The study supports the notion that innovations created with a quality improvement method can be more oriented towards process improvement, particularly in the public sector. Further, when the method enables professionals from different functions to participate in the process, the innovations created can be more comprehensively designed. Innovations can be classified according to their degree of novelty, type, resource consumption and the projected outcome. A project follow-up makes it possible to compare the projected outcome of the innovation against its actual outcome.

The method applied could be a viable option for practitioners considering public sector quality improvement and innovation capacity building. The paper provides guidelines for prioritizing innovations in terms of their resource consumption and usefulness.

Integrating quality improvement with innovation generation as a potential efficiency source for public-sector organizations has received relatively little research attention. Further, the paper provides a categorization for innovations in the public sector that provides guidelines for prioritizing innovations.

According to the literature concerned with this study, less than satisfactory outcomes have been achieved through implementing business process improvements methods (BPIMs) in industries, in general, and in healthcare, in particular. The existing methods used need to be enhanced in order to create more effective outcomes. There has also been a lack of studies documenting gaps or shortfalls in implementing BPIMs, to be presented to the BPI research community. Therefore, researchers of this paper have attempted to fill gaps between theory and practice. On the contrary, there is also a need to link practical outcomes in the healthcare domain with those of the BPI research community. The purpose of this paper is to review popular BPIMs, techniques and tools applied in the healthcare domain; it seeks to examine and highlight their significant roles, clarify their pros and cons, and find opportunities to enhance their impact on the achievement of more sustainable improvements in the healthcare domain.

This study has been carried out by using a methodology combining an in-depth literature review with a comparison framework, which is called as the “Framework for Comparing Business Process Improvement Methods.” The framework is composed of seven dimensions and has been adapted from four recognized, related frameworks. In addition to the in-depth review of related literature and the adapted comparison framework, researchers have conducted several interviews with healthcare BPI practitioners in different hospitals, to attain their opinions of BPI methods and tools used in their practices.

The main results have indicated that significant improvements have been achieved by implementing BPIMs in the healthcare domain according to related literature. However, there were some shortfalls in the existing methods that need to be resolved. The most important of these has been the shortfall in representing and analyzing targeted domain knowledge during improvement phases. The tool currently used for representing the domain, specifically flowcharts, is very abstract and does not present the domain in a clear form. The flowchart tool also fails to clearly present the separation of concerns between business processes and the information systems processes that support a business in a given domain.

The findings of this study can be useful for BPI practitioners and researchers, mainly within the healthcare domain. The findings can help these groups to understand BPIMs shortfalls and encourage them to consider how BPIMs can be potentially improved.

This researchers of this paper have proposed a comparison framework for highlighting popular BPIMs in the healthcare domain, along with their uses and shortfalls. In addition, they have conducted a deep literature review based on the practical results obtained from different healthcare institutions implementing unique BPIMs around the world. There has also been valuable interview feedback attained from BPI leaders of specific hospitals in Saudi Arabia. This combination is expected to contribute to knowledge of BPIMs from both theoretical and practical points of view.

Maintaining and improving productivity of product design and engineering processes has been a paramount challenge for design-driven companies, which are characterised a high degree of development of products and processes in order to meet particular customer requirements. Literature on this issue is fragmented and dispersed and a concise and systematic overview is lacking. Hence, it remains unclear, which methods are applicable for design-driven companies to improve the productivity of limitedly available engineering resources (a challenge companies and nations face currently). The purpose of this paper is to develop such a systematic overview.

An unusual approach was utilised by combining the outcomes from a systematic literature review and the results of a Delphi study. From both research approaches complementary and overlapping methods for improving the productivity of product design and engineering processes could be drawn.

The unique systematic overview presents 27 methods to increase the productivity, effectiveness and efficiency of product design and engineering processes of design-driven companies. Moreover, the study finds that methods for improving effectiveness are preferred over methods for improving efficiency and that limitations with regard to the availability of resources are often not considered.

During the development of the systematic overview, a lack of empirical evidence to assess the actual impact of productivity improvement methods was discovered. This shortcoming demonstrates the need for more conceptual and empirical work in this domain. More studies are needed to test and confirm the usefulness of the proposed methods.

Nevertheless, design-driven companies, which struggle to increase the productivity of their product design and engineering processes, can systematically select improvement methods from the overview according to their impact on productivity, effectiveness and efficiency. However, companies should keep in mind, whether effectiveness of product design and engineering can really be increased without considering limitations in engineering resources.

Therefore, the systematic overview provides a valuable map of the unexplored territory of productivity improvement methods for product design and engineering for both practitioners and researchers. For the latter ones, it creates directions for empirical investigations in order to explore and to compare methods for the improvement of productivity of product design and engineering processes.

In order to improve working methods, this study proposes a method for the analysis of medication incidents and the systematic planning of error‐proofing (EP) countermeasures, in the hope that it might contribute to a reduction in medication incidents.

In order to simplify the process of planning EP countermeasures, the following approaches are employed in this study. Improvement elements are extracted in order to plan EP countermeasures. The improvement elements that caused the error‐factor are called improvement objects, and the authors designed the extraction set of improvement objects. The authors correlated the improvement objects with recommended EP solutions. Finally, these parameters are collated. Moreover, these tools are summarized as a procedure for analysis of such incidents and for the creation of appropriate EP countermeasures.

Using this approach, this paper suggests four steps to reduce medical incidents. The proposed procedure can facilitate the planning of EP countermeasures and can reduce the rate of medical incidents.

It can be surmised that the proposed method can serve as a useful means for planning EP countermeasures and reducing the number of medication incidents. On the other hand, there are various countermeasures which can be planned for one incident by applying the proposed method.

The relationship between Error factors and improvement objects were then clarified through utilizing maps. Furthermore, a list that clearly indicates which EP solutions should be adopted for the improvement objects were suggested. There is, therefore, a significant difference between the proposed and the conventional method, and this makes it possible to plan the EP countermeasures easily.

There is a range of methodologies and techniques aimed at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of operational activity. Examples are business process reengineering, total quality management and organisation development. Such methods differ from each other in how “improvement” should be achieved and implemented and even what to improve. In this paper a number of improvement methods, together with their aims and implementation processes, are discussed. It becomes apparent from a review of these methods, based on the literature available, that none of the methods presented is particularly adept at identifying what to improve – how to find potential improvement areas. The paper describes a performance factor model and a measurement model designed to fill this gap; they are guides as to what to analyse and how to measure in improvement work.

Health services continue to face economic and capacity challenges. Quality improvement (QI) methods that can improve clinical care processes are therefore needed. However, the successful use of current QI methods within hospital settings remains a challenge. There is considerable scope for improvement of elective clinical pathways, such as hip and knee replacement, and so the use and study of QI methods in such settings is warranted.

A model to manage variability was adapted for use as a QI method and deployed to improve a hip and knee replacement surgical pathway. A prospective observational study, with a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design (quantitative emphasised) that consisted of two distinct phases, was used to assess its effectiveness.

Following the use of the novel QI method and the subsequent changes to care processes, the length of hospital stay was reduced by 18%. However, the interventions to improve care process highlighted by the QI method were not fully implemented. The qualitative data revealed that staff thought the new QI method (the model to manage variability) was simple, effective, offered advantages over other QI methods and had highlighted the correct changes to make. However, they felt that contextual factors around leadership, staffing and organisational issues had prevented changes being implemented and a greater improvement being made.

The quality of QI reporting in surgery has previously been highlighted as poor and lacking in prospective and comprehensively reported mixed-methods evaluations. This study therefore not only describes and presents the results of using a novel QI method but also provides new insights in regard to important contextual factors that may influence the success of QI methods and efforts.

This paper aims to systematically understand the development of rapid setup, quantitatively analyze the landscape and reveal new trends and challenges.

Based on 192 literature studies (1987–2021) collected from Scopus and Google Scholar, the papers are classified by: publication time and source; research type and data analysis of papers; pattern of authorship and country; sector-wise focus of the paper; improvement method used in the setup. And CiteSpace is used to analyze the cooccurrence and timeline of keywords.

There has been substantial progress in the past 35 years, including the rapid growth in the number of papers, the expansion in different disciplines, the participation of developing countries, the application in the service industry and the significant impact of setup on cost. And there are still some deficiencies.

There is concern that Google Scholar lacks the quality control needed for its use as a bibliometric tool. Future work is encouraged to conduct an in-depth discussion on high-quality papers.

In small batch production, rapid setup is increasingly essential. Clarifying the research focus and main improvement methods is of great significance for enterprises to meet the changing market needs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first literature review on rapid setup. It is decided to consider a detailed set of data for better introspection and trace the history reflections and the research future in setup time.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on challenges faced by longitudinal quantitative analyses of school improvement processes and offers a systematic literature review of current papers that use longitudinal analyses. In this context, the authors assessed designs and methods that are used to analyze the relation between school improvement processes and student outcomes. Based on this the authors point out to what extent the papers consider different aspects of the complex nature of school improvement (e.g. multilevel structure, indirect and nonlinear effects, reciprocity). The choice of study designs and methods of analysis substantially determines which aspects of this complexity are taken into account.

The authors searched in four international high-impact journals and in ERIC for articles reporting longitudinal school improvement studies. The database of the review consisted of a total of 428 journal articles. In total, 13 of the 428 papers met the selection criteria and were analyzed in detail.

The analyzed papers use a wide range of designs and methodological approaches. They support the assumption that sophisticated quantitative longitudinal designs and methods can be applied effectively in school improvement research. However, considering the complexity of school improvement is accompanied by high demands on designs and methods. Due to this none of the papers met the standards applied in this review completely.

In particular, further research is needed to consider a long period of observation, reciprocal indirect and nonlinear processes in a multilevel structure. Moreover, research is required for a better and unambiguous theoretical foundation and empirical validation of the number of and intervals between measurement points.

If more consideration is given to the complex nature of school improvement in future studies, the broader knowledge base will allow a better understanding of the dynamic relation of school improvement and student learning. It would thus be possible to make more appropriate recommendations for the support of school improvement practice.

The original contribution of the paper is to show which aspects of the complexity of school improvement processes – and to what extent – are currently addressed in designs and methods of analysis applied in quantitative longitudinal studies that investigate the relation between schools’ capacity to managing change and student outcomes. Additionally the authors aim at deriving need for further research and giving guidelines how designs and methods in further studies can reflect the complexity appropriately. It is highly important to consider all aspects of this complexity to describe and understand the dynamic relation of school improvement processes and student outcomes.

Many methodologies and techniques for improving operational performance have been developed over the years – these provide structured ways of improving company performance, but they do not explicitly tell us where to start. To be able to improve performance effectively, it is important to identify the particular factors of performance to work with. Furthermore, it is important to find those factors that have a high impact on performance. The paper presents a definition of performance, productivity and profitability and two main views of the relationships between the terms – a hierarchical view and a subset view. Each has its merits. Offers brief descriptions of some improvement techniques to show where the ideas for the suggested improvement method are taken from, i.e. a part of the analysis and synthesis process. Most of the techniques described are analysis tools, as the focus here is on identifying areas to improve – when it comes to the actual improvement, the actual solution is often quite easy. Finally, proposes a methodology for improvement work – this is to be evaluated in later research.