Some Issues on Quality Function Deployment for Innovative Products

Paper in proceeding, 2009

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) has been known as one of the most popular tools for customer-focused product or service design. However, its use in develop-ing innovative products seems to be quite limited. In this paper, some issues on why and how QFD may be considered as a potential tool in developing innovative products will be described. The main emphasis will be placed on how the QFD may eventually be an alternative way in developing innovative products with respect to the recent increasingly fast change in the market. To provide the context of the importance of incorporating market dynamics in QFD, an empirical example of the change of customer preference over time of a specific cell-phone market segment is used. Afterwards, how such change can be taken into account in the house of quality will be explained along with the possible tools and methods. Finally, the extent to which the enhanced QFD might be useful in developing innovative products will be discussed using the innovation adoption curve