Quality in R&D: Developing the Metaquality Product

Abstract

OVERVIEW: In today's globally competitive world, successful development means achieving a level of excellence that goes far beyond the traditional notions of a product as one that is durable, functional, and cost-effective. This heightened standard of excellence in a is referred to as its metaquality. Developing the comes about when considerable up-front effort is developed to creating and broadly communicating a vision. Even in well-managed companies with top-notch engineering talent and superb developmental facilities, executives regularly complain about the excessive time required and the poor quality of their new introductions. It has been estimated that one out of every three new introductions are outright technical failures, while as many as nine out of ten new products brought to market fall short in some way of reasonable sales or performance expectations. This article argues that the shortcomings in new development stem from two quite different causes: On the one hand are the quantum changes that have taken place in the last 20 years as to what constitutes a product. On the other hand, present-day new development structures lack effective upfront mechanisms to vision, that is to say, to define and differentiate new products. In the following sections, I shall first detail how expectations have changed radically over the last two decades. Next, I shall examine typical development structures in two classical organizations--the start-up enterprise and the ongoing corporation. Finally, I shall propose a revised new development structure to meet the challenges facing established companies. THE NATURE OF METAQUALITY As today's world marketplace initially evolved, the market players sought to win market share by the price mechanism. But as component materials and manufacturing labor themselves began to be procured globally, and as automation became widespread, price became less of a differentiator of value. Instead, by the 1380s, the new standard of a product's excellence became its so-called quality, the essence of which was a promise of durable and reliable performance consistent with the price paid. While initially there were highly discernible differences between the quality of one competitor's products and that of another's, the relentlessly competitive nature of the world marketplace again greatly reduced this disparity over the span of a decade. The U.S. automobile business vis-a-vis its foreign competitors is the prime example. If the relative prices and quality levels of world-competitive products have been tending to equalize, what then will determine a product's competitive value in the 1990s? In the short term, being first to market is clearly such an advantage, but over the long haul, the answer would seem to lie in the area of the customer's perceived performance--perceived in the greatly expanded sense of pleasing, exciting and continually rewarding the user throughout the product's entire life. In the American automobile industry, the apt term surprising delights has recently come into use among designers to describe those myriad yet distinguishing features, from engine responsiveness to sound insulation, that create this positive customer perception and continual sense of satisfaction. Like other transcendent concepts such as beauty, there is a semantic difficulty in trying to formalize precisely what we mean by surprising delights. It is clear, however, that such concepts as please, delight and reward go considerably beyond the notions of safe, durable and reliable, which we now expect as a matter of course. For this reason, I propose the term metaquality to convey this notion of a higher plateau of excellence. It defines the totality of those enhancements in value, form and function that typify today's winning products. …