The “Fuzzy Front End” of Innovation

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 “Fuzzy Front End” is unfortunately the least-well structured part of the innovation process, both in theory and in practice.The focus of the present chapter is on methods and tools to manage the “fuzzy front end” of the innovation process. Firstly, the activities, characteristics, and challenges of the front end are described. Secondly, a framework of the application fields for different methods and tools is presented: Since a product...