Bob Hunt wins the Akao Prize
Dr Bob Hunt Akao Prize Citation
Thursday 5th September 2002
Dr Bob Hunt has been an advocate and researcher on Quality Function Deployment (QFD) for almost 15 years. Following a career in private industry in which he rose to senior management levels in a multinational environment, Dr Hunt decided to devote himself to helping practising managers adopt leading edge management technologies. He left private enterprise and entered academe at Macquarie University Graduate School of Management, while at the same time studying for his PhD.
He chose QFD, applied to product and service innovation and began to study the experience of its application in Australasia and South East Asia. His research showed that the successful organisations were those who applied the QFD principles in a pragmatic and creative way, and that the most successful organisations applied many of the same principles to the development and deployment of their corporate strategy, and made a positive link between their innovation projects and their strategy. Dr Hunt's research has shown through the consideration of stakeholders as well as customers that QFD can be applied to strategy as well as innovation.
Dr Hunt's research continues to explore the way successful organisations go about developing their strategy and deploying down to individual change/innovation projects.
Dr Hunt's Centre of Management Innovation and Technology at Macquarie University has been a focus of QFD activity in Australasia and South East Asia, and he hosted the 1st Pacific Rim Symposium on Quality Deployment in 1995 and the World Innovation and Strategy Conference/ 4th International QFD Symposium in 1998. This conference has been the best attended of all the ISQFDs to date.
A founding member of the International Council for QFD, the International QFD Research Committee and the International QFD Symposium Committee, Dr Hunt is also the Regional QFD Coordinator for Australasia.
Through his Centre's Leading Edge in Strategy and Innovation seminars, Dr Hunt continues to bring the world's leading edge thinkers and practitioners to Australia to share and transfer part of their knowledge for the benefit of local managers. His Centre's web site also hosts the first free QFD tutorial to be offered on the Web. This tutorial has been designed to provide a general appreciation and introduction to the basic QFD methodology, and has been successfully used in University courses and in company awareness programs. The tutorial will soon be revised and posted on the QFD Institute web site as a standard world wide training resource for QFD.
This Akao Prize is presented to Dr Hunt in recognition of his research into the application of QFD principles to strategy, and for his continuing support and promotion of QFD.
In presenting the prize to Dr Hunt, Professor Akao said "Through your research, you have shown me how, by considering stakeholders, that QFD can be successfully applied to strategy".
For information on the Quality Function Deployment Institute visit http://www.qfdi.org/
