What do you do if your innovation is affecting the quality of your product?

The first step is to meticulously evaluate how exactly this innovation is impacting the quality of your product. This involves gathering data on various quality metrics that might be affected. It's also crucial to solicit feedback from users to understand their real-world experience. By pinpointing the specific areas where quality has declined, you can focus your efforts on those aspects. For instance, if the innovation involved a change in materials to reduce production costs, you might see a rise in customer complaints about product durability. In this case, you'd gather data on warranty claims and customer reviews to understand the extent of the decline in durability.

If innovation is affecting product quality, the best course of action is to actively communicate with customers. Soliciting direct input allows one to identify particular areas for improvement and implement targeted remedies. This not only addresses quality problems, but it also increases overall user satisfaction, which is an important statistic for any successful engineering project. To provide a great product, it is critical to maintain a customer-centric attitude, prioritising their demands, and making educated, data-driven decisions.

If innovation is negatively affecting product quality, I'd assess the impact, review requirements, collaborate with stakeholders, iterate and test the innovation, prioritize quality, document lessons learned, and focus on continuous improvement to address the issue effectively.

If your innovation is affecting quality means that something goes wrong with your change management process, so review it for next time. You will need to contain and fix the problem: 1) First thing to do is hold the suspect products in your house. Avoid at all costs that suspect products go to market, it can lead to big warrant claims costs in future. Create an inspection procedure to guarantee the quality of the products. Be prepared, this containment action will bring you one additional delivery problem and a high Customers pressure afterwards. 2) You will need to quickly fix the problem. Assess the product or process, find the root cause of problem. For that there are many root cause analysis methodologies available.

Often times large amounts of data may easily become overwhelming and distract from meticulous assessment of the problem at hand. I find that being able to distill the problems into specific themes may help considerably. Thereafter available data can be fit into the identified themes and trended. The real issues will easily present themselves & effort can be placed on solving the key issues-sometimes that is all that may be necessary with finite resources.

It is crucial in brainstorming sessions to be able to "level the field", to cut off "loud voices"-so that people freely contribute and all contributions are treated equally.

Once you have a clear understanding of how the innovation is affecting quality, it's time to refine the innovation process itself. This might involve revisiting the design choices you made during the innovation phase. Another approach could be to implement stricter quality control measures throughout the production process. This might involve additional testing steps or investing in more sophisticated quality control equipment. The goal here is to identify and eliminate defects before they reach the customer. In some cases, you might even need to explore entirely different approaches to achieve the innovation's goals.

Don't wait for a complete overhaul before taking action. The key here is to iterate quickly. Implement the changes you've identified based on your assessment, and then gather new feedback to see if the quality has improved. Be prepared to make further adjustments as needed. This iterative approach allows you to course-correct quickly & minimize negative impact on your product's quality. By following these steps, you can mitigate the negative effects of the innovation and ensure that your product maintains its high-quality standards. Remember, innovation is a continuous process, and there will be occasional bumps along the road. The important thing is to be adaptable and willing to refine your approach to achieve the best possible outcome.