Quality is one important characteristic of products and services, but customers can find some difficulties in evaluating it. If information is not uniformly distributed (e.g. sellers have more information than buyers), trade can be difficult (Akerlof 1970).
Certification, defined as the assurance that certain requirements are respected, is a possible mechanism to mitigate the asymmetric information. A typical example of certification is the university degree that assures of the fulfillment of academic requirements.
This thesis focuses on the ISO 9000 certification, which assures that the quality management system respects the requirements of the ISO 9000 standards family. Having been adopted by more than 1.000.000 organizations in the world, ISO 9000 is a well-known family of standards based on Total Quality Management, a managerial approach aimed to improve quality and organization performance. Several studies investigated ISO 9000 focusing mainly on the manufacturing sector where ISO 9000 originated. However, over the last years, ISO 9000 has being increasingly adopted in service sector. The current study contributes to this research stream taking on both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the adoption and the impact of ISO 9000 certification in services. More precisely, the thesis focuses on two main research questions:
Why do companies choose to be ISO 9000 certified?
What is the relationship between ISO 9000 and innovation?
The two research questions are investigated through the lens of the signaling model of education (Spence 1973, Weiss 1995). According to this framework, education can benefit the employee directly by increasing his expertise of an employee and by indirectly signaling his unobserved but relevant abilities (e.g. persistence). Similarly to education, ISO 9000 can improve organization performances and ISO 9000 certification can signal unobservable abilities of better companies.
Some implications are drawn from this theoretical framework and they are tested using a dedicated dataset obtained by combining firm-level data from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS 2006) with the list of ISO 9000 certified companies from Mouvement Luxembourgeois pour la Qualité (MLQ). In the quantitative analysis, the decision of ISO 9000 certification is modeled within a discrete choice model. The quantitative analysis is integrated by a multiple-case study that considers both manufacturing and service companies rigorously selected with the Coarsened Exact Matching method.
Addressing the first research question, the study focuses on the signaling effect of ISO 9000 certification. Results shows that companies seek for certification in order to signal to the market unobserved abilities only in specific contexts (e.g. when operating in international market). In addition, it appears that large companies are more likely to be certified than smaller companies. The quantitative analysis shows that the main motivation for certification is the requirements of business customers suggesting that certification is more effective in business to business market that than business to consumers. From a signaling point of view, it can be concluded that qualitative and quantitative findings are not in contrast but the hypothesis that ISO 9000 certification acts as signal is only partially supported.
Addressing the second research question, the study suggests that management of quality and management of innovation are not conflicting. Even if distinguishing between organizational benefits and the signaling effect can be difficult, qualitative results shows that ISO 9000 certified companies are more likely to successfully introduce new products and services or new organization and marketing techniques. ISO 9000 certification is correlated with technological innovation (product and process) of manufacturing companies and with innovation of service sector companies when non-technological innovation is considered (organizational and marketing). The qualitative results suggest that ISO 9000 especially in recent versions is not hindering innovation.
Reading together the results for both research questions, it appears that ISO 9000 could be a tool for policy-makers willing to improve innovation performance targeting specific groups of companies. Practitioners can better understand the features of firms for which the certification provides the best potential, also in terms of innovation. In this respect, management standards can be an effective tool to diffuse organizational skills among companies especially to companies that have less access to external managerial skills, like small companies.
Additionally, the findings of the research can be interpreted as an example of the positive impact that standardization can have on innovation, in line with the policies of European Union that recognize standardization as a potential catalyst for innovation.
