Press
The “House of Quality” Is Declared Obsolete by Leading Industry Experts
(Aspen, CO) July, 2007 – Today, Strategyn announces the release of a
groundbreaking article that explains how its methodology has replaced the house
of quality as the new standard best practice for the front end of innovation.
“Replacing the house of quality with a simpler and more effective practice is a
giant step forward in the evolution of the concept innovation process,” says
Strategyn CEO Tony Ulwick. “Companies can now utilize customer inputs to make
growth- and innovation-related decisions better and faster than before. The
house of quality’s matrices, and the time and expense demanded to use them, are
a thing of the past.”
Richard Zultner, a founder and director of the QFD Institute, agrees with this
assessment. “Innovation and product development are emerging as the keys to
company growth, and many companies continue to attempt to use the traditional
house of quality to help execute these complex processes,” said Zultner. “But as
a handful of companies discovered years ago, and as other companies are quickly
discovering today, the traditional house of quality is not the best tool for the
innovation process or even for the product development process, where it is most
commonly used.”
This breakthrough is the result of years of effort Strategyn has put into
understanding the innovation process and the types of customer inputs needed to
streamline its execution. Strategyn has defined a customer need in a way that
eliminates much of the complexity and error that has plagued other attempts to
improve the innovation process. “When I saw how Strategyn was approaching this
problem, I knew immediately they were on to something,” says Rick Norman, who is
now part of the Strategyn team. “Companies have for years complained that the
house of quality was tedious and time-consuming – and it has been subject to
criticism along a number of technical dimensions as well. In one fell swoop,
Strategyn has eliminated many of the problems that have for years plagued the
front end of innovation. This thinking has revolutionized the innovation
process.”
Soon after the traditional house of quality was introduced in the United States,
companies began to integrate it with the Pugh concept selection matrix, a tool
used in technical innovation to evaluate different technical design alternatives
against specific criteria. Over time, voice-of-the-customer (VOC) inputs, which
had become the standard inputs for technical innovation efforts relying on the
house of quality, became the inputs of choice for concept innovation as well. In
addition, companies repurposed the Pugh matrix to evaluate product concepts in
the concept innovation process. For over 20 years now, companies have used VOC
inputs, the traditional house of quality, and the Pugh matrix as ad hoc tools to
help execute the innovation process. In a quest to find a best practice for
innovation, many adaptations of the traditional house of quality and the Pugh
matrix have been attempted, with varying results. Until now, this mixed
assortment of tools has been the de facto Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) standard
practice for concept innovation.
With the advent of Strategyn’s outcome-driven innovation methodology, this has
changed. “The notion that the house of quality assists in the execution of
concept innovation is based on an incorrect assumption – that customer needs
(called ‘benefit statements’ in the house of quality) must be translated into
technical requirements, with their associated metrics (house-of-quality
outputs), before the company can generate and evaluate product concepts,” says
Ulwick. “As it turns out, when using the outcome-driven innovation process,
well-defined statements of the customer’s desired outcomes are the only inputs
required to uncover opportunities and brainstorm valued solutions.”
When desired outcomes are adopted as customer inputs into the concept innovation
process, the house of quality is no longer necessary. Because desired outcomes
are metrics-based (with customers themselves defining the metrics), there is no
need to translate them into company-defined technical requirement statements,
which is the primary purpose of the house of quality. Instead, desired outcome
statements are used directly as inputs into the idea generation and evaluation
process.
To download this article, visit Strategyn’s website at
www.strategyn.com and go to
Innovation
Resources (http://www.strategyn.com/publications/whitepapers.asp).
About Strategyn, Inc.
Strategyn is a pioneer and leader in Outcome-Driven Innovation®, a revolutionary
approach to innovation management that enables companies to unlock hidden
opportunities, reveal high-growth emerging markets, create breakthrough products
and services, and streamline business processes. Strategyn offers turn-key
innovation management programs to companies throughout the world. The programs
include education, tools and mentoring and support; everything a company needs
to build a competency in innovation.
Strategyn’s thinking has been adopted by organizations such as Microsoft, was
voted one of the best business ideas by Harvard Business Review, and is cited by
thought leader and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in his
book The Innovator’s Solution. In addition, it has supplanted QFD, VOC, and
other programs in many firms as a best practice and new standard for innovation.
For more information, read What Customers Want by Strategyn CEO Tony Ulwick,
visit www.strategyn.com, or call
866-729-8400.
About Anthony Ulwick
Anthony Ulwick, author of the best-selling book What Customers Want, has
published dozens of articles on innovation management and market research,
including the landmark Harvard Business Review article “Turn Customer Input into
Innovation.” He is also the founder and CEO of Strategyn, a pioneer of the
outcome-driven movement, and one of the leading authorities in the fields of
innovation, market research, and marketing strategy. Ulwick’s methods have been
adopted by many companies, including Microsoft, AIG, Robert Bosch Tool
Corporation, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly-Clark, HP, Motorola, Syngenta,
Chiquita, and others. He holds several patents on his unique approach to
innovation and strategy formulation. He can be reached at
press@strategyn.com.
Press Contact:
Lisa Jey Davis
Jey Associates Marketing & PR
CELL: 970-948-1109
|
