Enhancing Product Design Quality through Crowdsourcing

Team: Xiaojing Niu, Shengfeng Qin, Rose Wong, John Vines (Northumbria University).

Timeframe: 2017-2020

In order to compensate for the lack of in-house resources, Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs) need to create partnership with other SMEs or large organizations. But due to their different structure and decision-making processes, an early mutual understanding is very important. Besides, they need to sign a formal contract to enable the trust and confidence in the process. Although just accepting general terms and conditions on a crowdsourcing platform is not enough to enable the trust and confidence, it indeed offers an opportunity for SMEs to get access to online communities which may provide great ideas or solutions. Thus, SMEs hold a chance to gain customers’ satisfaction, confidence and loyalty by providing high quality product. The benefits of crowdsourcing have been recognized by a large proportion of SMEs, but they have not adopted it into their practice as a result of various reasons. The project is to analyse these reasons and provide a crowdsourcing platform to help SMEs adopt crowdsourcing in their product design and development practice.

Niu, Xiaojing, Shengfeng Qin, Haizhu Zhang, Meili Wang, and Rose Wong. “Exploring product design quality control and assurance under both traditional and crowdsourcing-based design environments.” Advances in Mechanical Engineering 10, no. 12 (2018): 1687814018814395.

Niu, Xiao-Jing, Sheng-Feng Qin, John Vines, Rose Wong, and Hui Lu. “Key crowdsourcing technologies for product design and development.” International Journal of Automation and Computing 16, no. 1 (2019): 1-15.

Niu, Xiaojing, and Shengfeng Qin. “A review of crowdsourcing technology for product design and development.” In 2017 23rd International Conference on Automation and Computing (ICAC), pp. 1-6. IEEE, 2017.