TI seeks great things for our products: we strive to continually improve performance while reducing environmental impact. Sustainable technology design and production promises to be a great growth frontier for TI because our innovations with TI components help dozens of industries make their products safer, greener and more reliable.
Product responsibility, or what we call product stewardship, encompasses nearly every aspect of our operations and is integral to the continual innovation of products to meet the world's needs. This includes helping ensure that our customers' products are created and supported in a responsible manner. We take a deliberate approach to addressing the many and evolving facets of product stewardship, including innovation management, conscientious design, responsible packaging and labeling, product content, marketing, ethics, and quality and compliance.
Company leaders set the direction and expectations for each facet of product stewardship, while our business units are responsible for ensuring that deliverables meet customer needs. Every employee is responsible for understanding these expectations – within their own organization and at the corporate level – in order to enable the design, development and delivery of exceptional products. Required training communicates these expectations and methodologies to all employees.
Innovation management and a commitment to work toward solutions with social and environmental benefits are key elements of TI's approach to product stewardship. We make significant investments annually in research and development, including product and technology definition, design, systems development, testing, and redesign. These investments are key to anticipating and meeting customer requirements and continuing TI's success in forward-thinking technology development. For example, our commitment to innovation can be seen in Kilby Labs, a center for applying technology to a wide spectrum of the world's needs, including efforts to support our customers' medical and energy-management initiatives.
TI takes a proactive approach in minimizing the impact to health and the environment at each stage of our products' life cycle, from design conception to disposal. We work hard to meet and exceed customer requirements and to identify and develop new technology that enables social and environmental benefits. We have also established proactive product safety and environmental measures.
In addition to conscientious design, TI is an industry leader in product transparency, efficiently and effectively providing information about the content of our products to meet the needs of customers and consumers. We also openly share our position on the many emerging global standards designed to protect customers, end consumers and the environment.
The contents of our products are carefully designed and managed to either eliminate hazardous material or, where appropriate, to use such material within the tight constraints of customer and industry standards during their manufacture. Our product labels provide content information as defined by industry and customer requirements. We also continue our work in aligning IECQ 080000 requirements with ISO9001 and TS16949 quality systems.
TI is concerned about mounting electronic waste and the proper disassembly and disposal of our consumer products at the end of their useful lives. TI considers the life cycle of products first during the design phase of our semiconductors by focusing on the use of responsible materials and by improving reliability to ensure a longer product life. We address product end-of-life and disposal issues applicable to our role both as a components manufacturer and as a producer of consumer devices such as graphing calculators.
TI continues its founders' commitment to ethical business practices, a requirement in today's global economy. Among other things, this commitment is illustrated in our compliance practices with respect to applicable laws and ethical practices involving marketing, advertising and sponsorship. We accomplish this by incorporating product, legal, communications and marketing expertise into our marketing communications processes. In this vein, an important element of ethical business conduct is the protection of confidential information. We exert the same significant care to protect our customers' trade secrets as we do to protect our own. Programs, training and infrastructure are designed to sensitize our employees to this important need so that we can meet these high expectations.
Our quality management system serves as the backplane for ensuring that product, support and manufacturing organizations are compliant with these and other requirements. Our quality organization has the responsibility to establish specifications to meet legal and customer requirements. Compliance with these requirements is checked through internal and external audits. Customer feedback from surveys and scorecards provides further evidence of compliance and provides insight on emerging needs. These and other product stewardship endeavors continue to be guided by TI's policies and procedures.
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