at early stages of new product development, the effort tooptimize is low and effects on the whole innovation process are high.therefore, a deeper understanding of fuzzy front end and its successcan help firms to be more successful in developing new products. wepresented and tested a conceptual model of relationships among keyvariable sre lated to the fuzzy front end,execution phase of new produ...

The fast transformation of technologies into new products or processes is one of the core challenges for any technology-based enterprise. Within the innovation process, we believe, the early phases (“fuzzy front end”) to have the highest impact on the whole process and the result (Input-Output Process), since it will influence the design and total costs of the innovation extremely. However the ...

The purpose of this paper is to develop and illustrate a performance-centered design (PCD) methodology for finding the underlying structure of ill-defined processes and problems. The context for our theoretical exposition is the fuzzy front-end of new product development (NPD). Within the NPD process, front-end concept definition and selection is central to a firm’s innovation capability becaus...

In this paper, we are going to report on the results of an exploratory piece of research about the typical front-end-related activities in 28 innovation projects carried out by 14 German and 13 Japanese companies to reduce project uncertainty. In all cases we observed a range of activities to reduce project specific risks and revealed differences in the practice of innovation management in both...