Today it's definitely known to everyone what Quality Management System is. A Quality Management System (QMS) is the set of all connected and interdependent activities that affect the quality of a process, a product or a service. Since the 80s the first Western companies, especially those Americans, started to realize the importance of the quality development for the success of an organization. It's always in the 80s that the first of standards of the reference ISO, aimed to the quality were published. In 1987, in fact, the International Organization for Standardization adopted the British code BS 5750 and published what is now called ISO 9000 series of standards. First of all, a cultural evolution, and then a technological revolution, is the history of the quality. This important legacy in terms of know-how, best practices and experiences has been used by the Italian Association for the promotion and the enhancement of the Culture of the Technology Transfer (AICTT), to transfer the results obtained in the field of the quality to the field of the business innovation. For the first time in Italy, but also in Europe, we speak of IMS, Innovation Management System as a means of certification. The core of this certification, proposed in a innovative form by AICTT, is to detect firm's ability to innovate, but not with regard to certification of the innovation made ex post, that is still a novelty in the panorama of certification activities, but with reference to the firm's ability of quantification of the tangible and intangible assets (human capital, creativity, etc..), measured using a parametric method based on a proprietary panel of indicators that are not statically linked each others, and free of any document of structural heaviness replaced by a fully web-based platform, inserted in the circuit system of university-industry-bank. To this end, the AICTT has filed a trademark, CTE (Company Technology Efficiency), which puts companies in a certain class of efficiency (the same way as it does for appliances with respect to energy compliance) and based on this can aspire to a certain threshold of credit in the industrial research.
