The evolution of quality management systems to assist manufcturing entrepreneurs in incubation clusters

Quality management systems are important for any organization to sustain growth, develop technologies and to manage innovation. However, the cost of quality can make it challenging for start-up enterprises to be competitive. South Africa needs to establish successful incubation models that can assist the country's government to reach key economic development milestones. The transformation of quality management systems in these incubation clusters to assist start-up enterprises is still not clearly understood. A quality management framework can assist to recognise the life cycle position of an incubation cluster and the phases to grow from a start-up into established value streams. In this study several manufacturing incubators in South Africa were visited to conduct an incubator quality management systems capability analysis. The stage of cluster growth of these incubators were plotted onto the quality management framework. Current best practices are highlighted and future work discussed.