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

Small and medium Enterprises (SMEs) 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 paper focuses on product design stages to investigate what key factors affect product design quality and how it can be controlled and assured. Firstly, we define the concept of product design quality and then identify its attributes and sub-attributes. Secondly, 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. Thirdly, 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 crowdsourcing-based design environment.