Because of the high degree of technological complexity and the increasing convergence of new technologies, it is becoming more and more difficult to develop advanced products for those companies who solely rely on their own in-house 'core competencies'. One possible response made to these rising...

The use of the internet for business purposes and among consumers is spreading at an impressive rate. Companies use it for a lot of different activities like, for example, marketing, online shopping and customer service. However, the use of the internet for the purpose of innovation, to create...

The intensive concern with customer needs and problems is one of the key contributors to the success of innovation management. During the seventies, numerous procedures were developed, in theory as well as in practice. These procedures entered literature as so called need-assessment approaches...

In a study of Japanese New Product Development (NPD) projects, the fuzzy front end of innovation is explored. Our conceptual model is based on the information-processing perspective. A structual equation model was fitted to data from 497 NPD projects from Japanese mechanical and electrical...

In this paper, we report on the results of a large-scale study about typical front-end-related innovation practices in 553 Japanese mechanical and electrical engineering companies. We explore typical activities concerning the generation and assessment of new product ideas, the reduction of...

Our study focuses on the question, whether users should be intensively involved in the innovation process of radical product innovations or better not - from the manufacturer's perspective. Radical innovations incorporate new technologies, shift market structures, require intensive user learning...

In new product development (NPD) unacceptably high failure rates have often been related to insufficiencies during the early development phases. Nevertheless, only little effort is devoted to the early phases, in theory as well as in practice, and managers often indicate the front end as being...

In this study we research user integration in the German service industry. Goal is to explore the industrial practice with regard to four dimensions of user integration, i.e., why, whom, how, and how successful the service industry integrates to find novel service ideas. Data is collected from a...

Traditionally the protection of intellectual property is regarded as a precondition for value capture. The rise of open source (OS) software and OS tangible products, so-called open design, has challenged this understanding. Openness is often regarded as a dichotomous variable (open-source vs....

In this paper we report on the results of an interview research about new product development (NPD) processes and planning in 15 Japanese mechanical and electrical engineering companies. We asked the companies to describe one successful and one less successful project. All in all, we collected...