A Socio-interactive Framework for the Fuzzy Front End

This paper aims to illustrate that the dominating rational-analytic perspective on the Fuzzy Front End (FFE) of innovation could benefit by a complementary sociointeractive perspective that addresses the social processes during the FFE. We have developed a still fledgling socio-interactive framework blending existing knowledge of the FFE with theories from design methodology and the psycho-social sciences. For the framework constructs like the interplay of design problem and design solution, mental models and social processes are used and applied to the results of an empirical study for illustration. The paper ends by discussing the results and presenting a future research agenda including implications for management. INTRODUCTION Consider the following quote from a salesman of a globally operating supplier of mechanical parts for among others the automotive industry who was interviewed for the current research: “...we have an idea [from a customer], but we are desperate ... It is like a wall, you run with your nose to the wall and you don’t come further [with the new idea]...” This quote clearly illustrates this paper’s core issues: the problems that actors in the front end of innovation encounter in their efforts to bring new ideas further into the organization. From this research project we have learned that interactional and communicational problems behind this quote and similar quotes are quite often causing frictions and barriers in respect to the progress of the early or upfront stages of New Product Development (NPD). In our technology driven, rapidly changing society, the need for fast and innovative product design becomes more and more eminent. But, the design process officially only starts at the moment a clear picture is obtained of the market opportunity and an idea for the new product including a strategy of how to combine these two into a high quality design. In the last decade, this front end of NPD is denoted as a very important and also challenging phase because of its non-transparent character. Due to the required and difficult translation from vague ideas about market needs and likewise vague ideas about possible new products to a new and innovative business concept the front end of innovation is often referred to as the Fuzzy Front End (FFE) (Smith & Reinertsen, 1991). In this paper the focus will be on the early stages of the FFE when there is no clearly defined market need, nor a detailed idea for the new product. For a design process to get started a clear match between those two elements is necessary. Typical activities in this phase are: need identification, need assessment, idea generation & selection, and concept generation (Koen et al., 2001). These activities are believed to result in writing a business case and/or a project proposal to convince top-management to provide the funding and the resources needed for the NPD-project. This seems quiet straightforward and is illustrative for the dominant rational-analytic perspective on the FFE in literature that is suggested to be of help in cases of incremental innovation (Kim & Wilemon, 2001). However, because of its contingent character (Khurana & Rosenthal, 1998; Reinertsen, 1999; Nobelius & Trygg, 2002) framework-building in the area of the FFE is still considered to be very limited (Kim & Wilemon, 2002) and this is even more true for discontinuous innovation. Reid and De Brentani (2004, p. 182) point out that, researchers who discuss discontinuous innovation “have tended to invoke NPD processes, which are relevant to incremental innovation” and not to discontinuous innovation. Researchers miss therefore in their descriptions essential differences related to the creative process, because discontinuous innovations require a process of “identifying, understanding and acting on emerging patterns in the environment” (2004, p. 182) and do not start with a more or less defined and structured problem situation as is the case with incremental innovation. From this it becomes clear that there is an urgent need to investigate the idea-forming stages related to discontinuous innovation from a different perspective in order to be able to create a deeper understanding. What perspective could this be? Recent literature on discontinuous innovation shows that it is seldom the case that only one individual is involved in making the creative connection that leads to opportunity recognition and further on to start the NPD project (Colarelli O’Connor & Veryzer, 2001; Reid & De Brentani, 2004; Veryzer, 2005). The people that have the most articulated (still not very clear) image of possible market needs are in most cases not the same people that have sufficient knowledge of (technological) possibilities that could result in the match sought for. The result is that people need to interact with each other and that iterations are needed before a promising opportunity gets defined; sometimes even successive cycles of opportunity recognition are necessary (Colarelli O’Connor & Rice, 2001). The role of individuals in this process is believed to be important, but we should not forget that these individuals are not acting on their own but are engaged in social processes in order to share and acquire information and knowledge that form the base of their recognition activities. Although recent literature seems to make some first steps away from the rational-analytic paradigm by lowering the level of analysis to the level of individuals they do not provide enough footholds to build on because they refrain from mentioning the social system these individuals are engaged in. Therefore this so-called socio-interactive perspective is still largely missing in the FFE literature. This paper aims to make a first step in filling this gap by presenting the results of a study that focused on improving the processes of the fuzzy front end. The main theme of this paper is to illustrate that a fundamental approach that aims to investigate the socio-interactive side of the FFE in addition to the existing rational-analytic paradigm could be a promising direction to advance our knowledge on discontinuous FFE. Next, we will describe the rational-analytic perspective on FFE which is followed by defining innovativeness. Subsequently, we will use theoretical constructs from the field of design methodology as an analogy for the creative phase of discontinuous FFE. Then we make clear that the FFE must be considered as a social process that leads to a new social reality. Introducing the psychological construct of mental models completes the socio-interactive framework of the FFE. The findings of the empirical research will be used to illustrate this socio-interactive framework. The paper ends by discussing our findings and by presenting managerial implications. RATIONAL-ANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE ON FFE Over the last two decades, the research attention of academics on one side and professionals on the others side to better understand the FFE has certainly increased. Over the years, many theoretical phase models that somehow describe the FFEprocess have been published. In this section we will briefly describe some models and perspectives as found in literature to create a better understanding of the FFE-process from the rational-analytic viewpoint. Cooper (1983) is one of the first researchers to explicitly focus on the FFE and starts with the generation of ideas and ends this phase with the definition of a concept. Later models include at the end also the project planning stage or even the actual product development (Roozenburg & Eekels, 1995; Buijs, 2003). However, Nobelius and Trygg (2002) found in their explorative case studies that in practice there is a large variation of front-end models containing a variety of activities, sequences, degree of overlap and perceived importance of specific tasks. These findings are in accordance with the suggestions by other researchers that the FFE has a contingent character, meaning that there is no one best way of managing the FFE-process. This seems to disqualify the prescriptive models that present a general step-by-step approach. However, some activities seem to be relevant to most of the FFE-situations be it that they do not occur in the same sequence for all projects. Koen et al. (2001) developed a circular model based on experiences from eight multinationals. They characterize the FFE process by saying it is chaotic, unpredictable and unstructured but that five elements are found in all eight FFE: idea generation, opportunity analysis, idea genesis, idea selection as well as concept and technical development. The center part of their circular model, which is called the engine and consists of leadership and culture, drives these five elements. Around the engine and its five elements are the influencing factors such as competitive environment and business strategy. The circular shape of the model expresses the flow and the circulation of ideas, iteration between the five elements, and the dependency among them. Although they step away from a strict rationalanalytic and sequential model, they don’t yet make the connection to the sociointeractive perspective that needs to connect these activities on the level of the actors involved. Schröder and Jetter (2003) also create a certain dependency between three phases they describe: opportunity recognition, product concept creation, and concept evaluation and testing. They emphasize that there should be a focus on the following aspects: support of uncertain, imprecise and dynamically changing information, processing of diverse information and enhancing information processing capabilities. Although they fail to show how this additional support must be realized during the FFE, the information perspective fits the socio-interactive view as we will show later. The models as found in literature seem to be more applicable to the situation of incremental innovation than to discontinuous innovation that we are focusing on. But what are the characteristics of discontinuous innovation? In the next section we will answer this question by reviewing the literature thereof. DEFINING INNOVATIVENESS In the last two decades academics have introduced a plethora of names and definitions to indicate levels of innovativeness. The result is an ambiguous situation regarding the interpretations and comparisons of the literature that addresses all these innovations (Garcia & Calantone, 2002). At the moment there are many other terms ubiquitously in use like, incremental, routine, imitative, steady state, radical, disruptive, breakthrough, discontinuous, really new and disruptive to identify innovation. In general, one could identify a dichotomy that is made up by radical innovation on one side and incremental innovation on the other side. In the typology that is developed by Garcia & Calantone a third category is proposed in between these two extremes and labeled as ‘really new’ innovation. Their motivation is that only 10% of all innovations can be considered as radical which labels the remaining 90% as being incremental. This is not very realistic because it seems to skip a presumably large group of moderately innovative innovations in between radical and incremental. For evaluating innovations they propose a distinction between a macro/micro perspective on one side and marketing/technological discontinuities on the other side. The macro/micro perspective is related to evaluating the innovativeness based on factors exogenous to the firm (macro) and on factors related to the firm and its present market (micro). The marketing discontinuities may require new marketing skills or new marketplaces, whereas the technological discontinuities refer to paradigm shifts related to technologies embedded in products, production and/or R&D. It should be made clear here that every evaluation of innovativeness should be relative to the innovating firm. What is discontinuous for one firm could be incremental for another, even if they are developing the same innovation. According to Garcia and Calantone (2002) the term discontinuous innovation, as being used in this paper, cover the ‘radical’ and ‘really new’ innovations and as such fits perfectly the early idea stage of the FFE that is presented here. One should realize that during the early stage before the opportunity is fully recognized there is no firm combination of market need and product concept and therefore it is impossible to categorize the future innovation in classes like radical or really new, hence our focus on discontinuous innovation. The next section aims to introduce an additional perspective on the specific form of reasoning belonging to discontinuous innovation. Theoretical constructs that stem from design methodology seem to be of help. CREATIVE DESIGN AS ANALOGY TO DISCONTINUOUS INNOVATION In this section we will draw a parallel between the discontinuous FFE and the creative design process in order to create a more fundamental view of the FFE phase. We will start with describing the design process as a process of matching the problem space and the solution space. Connecting this to the situation of discontinuous FFE is