Towards a Structured and Integrative Front-End of Product Innovation

The front-end phase of the innovation process decides over up to two-thirds of the total cost for new product development. Practitioners and innovation researchers agree upon the relevance of this early innovation stage which consists of opportunity identification, idea generation and evaluation, business-plan development and product conception. Yet the need for structuring the front-end phase for more performance in innovation is slowly gaining recognition.
Companies' current product development processes concentrate on sequential methodologies. They are not transferable to the fuzzy front-end phase with its iterative learning cycles. As a result, product requirements and technical feasibilities are typically not fixed before the official product development process starts. Furthermore customer requirements are neither fully explicit nor stable. They must be uncovered or stimulated by prototype modules which can be viewed, explored and understood by customers. Consequently, this study develops a process-methodology for a structured innovation front-end phase taking into account iterative learning cycles between product development stakeholders. This idea parallels the "extreme programming' approach known from the software development. Short cycles with high iterative learning potential have increased efficiency and effectiveness of the innovation process by factors.
The empirical base of our study consists of 19 in-depth case studies with European companies from different modular industries. The first outcome of our ongoing research provides an iterative and semi-structured process model for frontloading the explicit and hidden customer requirements.