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Upcoming as well as mature industries are facing pressure as regards successfully managing operational excellence, and, at the same time, driving and managing innovation. Quality management concepts and practices’ ability to tackle this challenge have been questioned. It has even been suggested that there is a need to provide and promote an updated/changed, and even re-branded, version of Total Quality Management, merging quality management (QM) and innovation management (IM). Can such a shift then actually be spotted? The purpose of this paper is to explore and see if there are any signs suggesting that QM and IM actually are about to merge.

The study is based on literature reviews, document studies and interviews.

The paper highlights three signs indicating that QM and IM indeed are approaching each other, and that it is a movement driven from both sectors, e.g., in the work with new ISO-standards and the Toyota Kata framework.

The indicated development has fundamental and extensive practical implications. It will for example have to be followed by a similar merging of the two fields in the educational system, and in the competences of future managers.

Organizations will be key to realizing the “transformative change for humanity” now being called for. However, the complexity calls for new ways of facilitating change and organizational learning; it also calls for moving beyond sustainability to develop practices that restore and regenerate the world in which we live. Above all, it calls for the development of new frameworks, practices, mindset and capabilities to hold space for and facilitate such transformation, to dance with the “Logic of Life.” The purpose of this study is to contribute to advancing the current leading frameworks and practices of facilitating learning and development towards the enabling of regenerative transformative change in organizations and society.

This study is based on an exploratory qualitative analysis of a facilitation prototype that expands the current framework and practice of Appreciative Inquiry Summits toward regeneration.

This study presents four paradoxes of regenerative facilitation to guide the dance for life in complex ecosystems. It also identifies that the dance needs to be widened, towards inviting more frequently the ends of the four paradoxes noted as regenerative, negative emotions, inner and more-than-human.

This study explores the intersection of practices and frameworks for facilitating complexity with principles from regenerative leadership and complexity theory, potentially making an important contribution to the urgent and widespread need to facilitate a regenerative transformative change for humanity, society and our organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe the perspectives and reasoning of senior development leaders in healthcare organizations, when reflecting on design as theory and practice in relation to more traditional methods and tools for improving quality and support innovation.

The paper is based on a qualitative interview design with five development and innovation leaders from separate healthcare regions in Sweden. They have, to varying degrees, applied design theory and practice for quality improvement and innovation in their organizations. The interview transcript was analysed using a content analysis together with an interpretive approach.

The major findings are to be found in the balancing act for leadership and organizations in healthcare when it comes to introducing and combining different theories and practices for improving quality and support innovation. The balance is between the change in power dynamics and pushing traditional boundaries in a complex healthcare world.

The narratives from the leaders' experience of applying design theory and practice for improving healthcare quality can help us create readiness and knowledge about how we prevent and/or facilitate planning and implementing design theories, practices, methods and tools in a healthcare context.

The study provides a unique insight when it captures and illustrates five different organizations' experiences when applying design for developing healthcare quality.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge concerning the dynamics and potential cultural tensions that occur when applying user involvement and design thinking (DT) for improving quality in a health-care setting.

This paper is based on a case study following a quality improvement (QI) project in a medium-sized Swedish county council in the field of somatic care. The project involved eight health-care professionals, one designer, four patients and two relatives. A multiple data collection method over a period of ten months was used. It included individual interviews, e-mail correspondence and observations of workshops that covered the QI project.

The result shows tensions between QI work and the daily clinical work of the participants. These tensions primarily concern the conflict between fast and slow processes, the problem of moving between different fields of knowledge, being a resource for the individual clinic and the system and the participants’ expectations and assumptions about roles and responsibilities in a QI project. Furthermore, these findings could be interpreted as signs of a development culture in the health-care context.

There are several practical implications. Among others, the insights can inspire how to approach and contextualize the current concepts, roles and methods of DT and user involvement so that they can be more easily understood and integrated into the existing culture and way of working in the health-care sector.

This study provides a unique insight into a case, trying to uncover what actually is going on and perhaps, why certain things are not happening at all, when user involvement and design practices are applied for improving health-care quality.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss recent trends in the circular economy and investigate how value stream mapping (VSM) can be extended to more fully include some of the critical aspects of circular economy.

The findings are based on previous research that has explored the usage of VSM to include aspects of the environment and sustainability aspects. These ideas are then expanded to new ways to use VSM by mapping value of a product as it is; used, maintained, re-used, remanufactured, recycled, incinerated or used for landfill. The authors test out this approach through application in the waste management sector to identify possibilities for improvement and new business opportunities in what now is considered waste.

This paper introduces an expanded version of VSM that refines the existing Lean toolbox for exploring value and mapping value in a circular economy.

The aim of this paper is to expand the relevance and practical value of VSM as the world economy increasingly moves toward a circular one.

Today, VSM is a widespread method within Lean manufacturing that scrutinizes value creation within an organization or within a value chain. This paper describes how VSM can be refined to explore value streams in the afterlife of a product and explore waste as a resource utilization opportunity.

The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the results from the appreciative inquiry (AI)-inspired interviews to explore the underlying values held by top managers and to identify soft aspects of leadership.

Top managers were interviewed as a part of a research project with the aim to support the development of value-based leadership that integrates company values, organizational culture, customer needs and sustainable development. A structured interview guide, inspired by AI, was developed and used to pinpoint their motivation and vision of a good organization to understand the values that the managers had and to identify soft aspects of leadership. The interviews were analyzed in workshops with the whole research team and structured and visualized through affinity diagrams.

The results showed the underlying values held by top managers and identified soft aspects of leadership.

The presented interview guide can be used to identify the top managers’ underlying values, and the presented results from the interviews can be used to inspire other managers and leaders to develop their leadership in their striving of good leadership and effective organizations.

The paper explains how to apply an AI-inspired interview guide in finding out value-based leadership and soft aspects of leadership for enhancing organizational culture.

Metaphors are a powerful and human way of understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. In quality management (QM), several metaphors are used to describe and bring to life the often-abstract QM concepts and systems. These metaphors are of great importance for how QM is understood, communicated and practiced. However, the metaphors of QM have seldom been systematically screened or put in focus, neither the topic of a critical discussion. The purpose of this paper is hence to contribute with a screening of the metaphors currently used, within QM literature and in practice among QM leaders, and then elaborate on their potential for improvement and development.

The paper is based on a literature review combined with interviews of QM leaders.

The paper highlights that the current QM metaphors provide intuitive associations to properties such as stability, shelter, and structure, but not to the important dynamic properties of QM, such as learning, or to the critical role of people in QM. What can be seen as core properties of QM are communicated by texts or labels added on to metaphors with properties that often are in sharp contrast to them. The paper also provides suggestions for further improvements and development.

The paper highlights the area of metaphors within QM as an important area for future research. It also provides insights concerning the successful use and selection of metaphors in future QM practice.

The capability of an organization to perform not only incremental quality improvements to the existing processes and products but also innovative or radical improvements that explore new opportunities is referred to as organizational ambidexterity. Research indicates that the long-term success of organizations demands a dynamic balancing of and excelling at both perspectives. However, there is considerably less clarity as regards how this can be achieved. The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore enabling factors for organizational ambidexterity in the public sector.

This study is a qualitative study based on interviews with managers at two public organizations in Sweden. The analysis is conducted using a soft system methodology.

Nine enabling factors for organizational ambidexterity are identified and presented in two pictures inspired by the Soft System Methodology. The study indicates that it above all is important to create leeway for exploration to achieve organizational ambidexterity in the public sector. The study strengthens the belief that some quality movement values and tools can be considered important, whereas others can counteract the ability to achieve organizational ambidexterity in public administration.

Practitioners and scholars can use the identified enablers and the Soft System Methodology presented in this study to examine and develop the organizational ambidexterity of other public organizations.

This study explores empirically the concept of ambidexterity in the public sector, a perspective that few previous scholars have studied.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology that can support the process of understanding and designing for the satisfaction of high-level needs in practice. The satisfaction of high-level needs has seldom been in focus when it comes to customer satisfaction surveys or the process of new product or service development. However, needs do occur on various levels, and the satisfaction of high-level needs actually appears to have the greatest potential for the creation of loyalty among customers and customer satisfaction. The satisfaction of high-level needs has furthermore been pointed out as a strategy for the creation of attractive quality.

The paper is based on literature studies and the application of the Ideation Need Mapping (INM) methodology in a specific case.

The paper presents the INM methodology that could be used for guiding product and service innovation in practice. More specifically, the methodology supports the process of understanding and designing for the satisfaction of high-level needs.

This paper aims to contribute to envisioning and demonstrating how the understanding of, and design for, satisfaction of high-level needs can be done in practice.

A new type of business offering is currently gaining much attention, a type which in some aspects appears to be distinct from goods and services. These offerings are usually denoted as commercial experiences and are claimed to provide higher customer value than other types of offerings as they, for example, engage customers in an inherently memorable way. The understanding of what constitutes commercial experiences is however still scant. The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at the commercial experience concept from a customer perspective. The paper aims specifically at elaborating and defining commercial experiences as well as distinguishing them from goods and services.

The paper is based on literature studies.

The authors identify memorable as the fundamental distinctive characteristic for commercial experiences. Memorable events are then shown to be strongly emotional events. Finally the two‐factor structure of affect is used to show that the factor “strong engagement” is a critical driver of commercial experiences. As a result of the elaboration the authors also propose a new definition of commercial experiences and distinguish commercial experiences from goods and services in three ways.

The paper increases the currently scant understanding of commercial experiences.