I found your views on benchmarking and QFD very insightful. The pace at which technology and product life cycles are altering today is putting my organizations under a lot of pressure to innovate. Liker and Morgan (2006) observed that Toyota Product Development System (TPDS), continually develops new products faster, with great quality, less cost and more profit than competitors. One of the key principles' that make easy this is front-loading the product development phase to allow cross-functional input to thrive while entirely focused on customer defined value. The usual conflict between engineering and stylists does not occur as all focus in on what the customer needs.
In launching a new product in the market, Govers (2001) noted that there is an element of expressed, attractive and implicit quality. Attractive quality is where the customer has not asked for it as they are simply not aware of it while implicit quality refers to quality that is a given. He further describes that functional organizations can have challenges transitioning from research and development to manufacturing. The key challenge at this point is what Toyota tries to avoid during front-loading the development phase. The argument being that there is room to manoeuvre in the starting phase compared to later on in the project. Measure twice cut once as the saying goes.
For small upcoming organizations that have little scope to manoeuvre in terms of budget and resources, providing attractive quality coupled with expressed and implicit quality offers a way to disrupt markets and to gain market share. Perhaps one could argue that the iPod matched to iTunes is a good example of all three elements of quality when Apple as a company was struggling. There is an element of stepping into the unknown. How would one leverage benchmarking and combine it with QFD in such a situation? The benchmarks relate to a product or service that will not be the future.)