Exploring product design quality control and assurance under both traditional and crowdsourcing-based design environments

Abstract

Small and medium-sized enterprises face the challenges that they do not have enough employees and related resources to produce high-quality products with limited budget and time. The emergence of crowdsourcing provides an opportunity for them to improve their products by leveraging the wisdom of a large community of crowds, including their potential customers. With this new opportunity, product design could be conducted partially in a traditional design environment (in-house design) and partially in a crowdsourcing environment. This article focuses on product design stages to investigate what key factors affect product design quality and how it can be controlled and assured. First, we define the concept of product design quality and then identify its attributes and sub-attributes. Second, we separately survey key factors affecting product design quality in traditional and crowdsourcing-based design environments, quality control approaches/theories and quality assurance policies in traditional design environment. Third, a comparison of product design quality issues between the traditional and crowdsourcing-based design environments is progressed focusing on various aspects influencing product design activity quality. Finally, we discuss product design quality control approaches and quality assurance policies, quality control challenges and corresponding solutions in crowdsourcingbased design environment.

Does Crowdsourcing as Part of User-Driven Innovation Activity Affect Its Results? An Empirical Analysis of R&D Departments in Poland

“…Our research highlights the importance of digital technologies in collecting, developing, monitoring, and analyzing the economic links between crowdsourcing and innovation in companies. According to the literature on the development of enterprises, digital technologies enable a large contribution of customers to the improvement of products and services through a developed network where feedback on the purchases made can be obtained [68]. Therefore, we argue that planning, developing, and implementing new ideas and inventions can be realized by systematically taking into account the opinions of customers and their knowledge regarding the development of the usability of products and services.…”

Crowdsourcing and open innovation: a systematic literature review, an integrated framework and a research agenda

“…In terms of Organization and social interactions, compared to other computersupported cooperative work, such as social computing, social machines, in the crowdsourcing process, the emphasis is on Human participants (Niu et al 2018). Kazai et al (2013) addressed the "human factor" issue, exploring the human characteristics of the crowd that shape the experience of contributors with the crowdsourced task.…”

Product design Lifecycle information model (PDLIM)

“…According to the crowdsourcing quality model [8], the output (data/product) quality is determined by people quality, process quality and software/crowdsourcing platform quality. Therefore, the information identi ed in crowdsourcing design environments is mainly extracted into the following six categories [7,8] (see Fig. 8).…”

“…Currently, the crowdsourced design activities are supported by a combined design environment of traditional in-house design and platform-based crowdsourcing design. Effective design information communication and data-informed decision making in this combined environment are key in uential factors for good design quality [7]. Although crowdsourcing opens up opportunities for exibly coordinating external participants or even experts/professionals for knowledge intensive product design activities, it also brings some concerns on product design quality and Intellectual Properties [8].…”