Improvement of QFD-based total quality for local cultural industries: procedural and empirical investigation

Despite the tendency among local cultural industries (LCIs) to combine regional characteristics and conscious representation of surrounding communities to achieve multi-functions related to a particular culture, local production, local living, and ecosystems, a creative, systematic, and customer-oriented approach to improve the quality of LCIs has received scarce attention. Therefore, this study establishes a total quality improvement framework based on quality function deployment (QFD) by integrating the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) and a balanced scorecard (BSC). A case study is also performed in I-lan County of eastern Taiwan to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed QFD-based approach. Finally, 15 technical requirements are deployed by the BSC based on a MBNQA-based strategy. Moreover, the leading three priorities to enhance the total quality for use in LCI applications include professional skills training, historical culture, and locality globalization, respectively.