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As the products which innovated usability have succeeded in the market, the usability of products is now considered as a new dimension of product design. This paper deals with the following questions: How has usability been embedded in the design and development of products? In the usability context, why have some breakthrough products succeeded commercially and others failed? What should be learned from the successes and the failures? For the purpose of discussing these questions, the photography industry was examined and the results were used as an illustration of the important points.

Six sigma is much less of a technical program than it is a leadership and cultural change program. Nevertheless, most of literatures on six sigma have mainly focused on technical and tactical aspects. This paper introduces a self‐assessment for six sigma initiative in a major Korean software company. The self‐assessment gives a valuable clue to how to manage leadership and cultural aspects of six sigma initiative.

Since there are fundamental contradictions in difficult engineering problems, most solutions have been trade‐offs between conflicting requirements. In those cases, an improvement of a system parameter causes deterioration of another parameter in the system. TRIZ, a structured method for creative problem solving, is used to obtain breakthrough solutions resolving or eliminating the contradictions. In this paper, it is examined that the engineering‐based TRIZ approach can be successfully used in inventory management. The result shows that there is good chance of applying TRIZ to managerial problems.