CROSSING HORIZONS: LEVERAGING CROSS-INDUSTRY INNOVATION SEARCH IN THE FRONT-END OF THE INNOVATION PROCESS

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (04) ◽  
pp. 683-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
SABINE BRUNSWICKER ◽  
ULRICH HUTSCHEK
Keyword(s):  
Open Innovation ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Interactive Search ◽  
Knowledge Domains ◽  
Innovation Research ◽  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Front End ◽  
Analogical Problem ◽  
New Ideas

"Open innovation" and "external search" for new ideas are central topics in the recent discourse in innovation research. External search helps firms to identify new opportunities for innovation and alleviates the risks of local search. It is widely acknowledged that novel ideas regularly emerge from the combination of distant pieces of knowledge and interaction with "idea suppliers" from distant knowledge domains. However, the current discussion on open innovation has hardly touched upon the question of how firms can systematically search for cross-industry innovation inputs in the fuzzy front-end of the innovation process. This paper links relevant concepts of cognitive psychology and management theory — such as analogical problem solving and the principle of isomorphism — with open innovation in the front-end. It discusses relevant dimensions of systematic search for innovation across industries. A piloted framework is presented that assists firms in systematically and interactively searching for external innovation inputs in distant industries. This framework supports external innovation search in distant industries for a fuzzy customer problem. The results of this participatory action research indicate that a systematic and interactive search process is of practical value to innovation managers. It also points out contingencies of cross-industry innovation search.

MAPPING THE PERCEPTION AND REALITY OF OPEN INNOVATION

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (06) ◽  
pp. 1340016 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUSTYNA DĄBROWSKA ◽  
IRINA FIEGENBAUM ◽  
ANTERO KUTVONEN
Keyword(s):  
Open Innovation ◽  
Innovation Management ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
Innovation Research ◽  
Innovation Activities ◽  
Current State ◽  
Business Practitioners ◽  
The Right ◽  
Innovation Practices ◽  
Innovation Processes

Open innovation holds great potential for improving the efficiency of companies' innovation processes, but also presents substantial risks. A key issue in innovation management is finding the right balance of openness, i.e., determining how open companies should be in their innovation activities. However, academics and business practitioners hold conflicting notions of what constitutes open innovation practice and of how "open innovation companies" are defined. In this paper, we present three in-depth case studies of global R&D-intensive companies, where we find that the firms' perception of their openness differs from their actual situation (as determined by the innovation practices that they apply), and that each company has a different view as to what constitutes open innovation. We claim that resolving conceptual ambiguity and differentiating between openness (as a philosophical aspect) and open innovation (as a way of structuring the innovation process) in research is critical in order to clarify the current state of open innovation research and enable the communication of results to practitioners.

The Back End of Open Innovation

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-85
Author(s):  
Henry Chesbrough
Keyword(s):  
Open Innovation ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
Talent Management ◽  
Business Units ◽  
Front End ◽  
Compensation Systems ◽  
Valley Of Death

There is a Valley of Death inside many organizations, between the innovation managers and the business units of the company. This internal valley results from human, organizational, and structural bottlenecks that impede the flow of knowledge from the laboratory to the market. A powerful example of these bottlenecks surfaced in recent research at NASA. Four companies’ practices for managing these bottlenecks are discussed: SAP, Intel, EMC, and Royal Bank of Scotland. Companies must approach these bottlenecks with care, and examine their compensation systems, their funding processes, and talent management practices, to connect the back end of the innovation process to the front end of that process.

Healthcare in the age of open innovation – A literature review

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofie Wass ◽  
Vivian Vimarlund
Keyword(s):  
Open Innovation ◽  
Initial Phase ◽  
Patient Empowerment ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
Positive Outcome ◽  
Innovation Networks ◽  
Positive Outcomes ◽  
Inclusion Criteria ◽  
Innovation Research ◽  
Healthcare Data

Background: In spite of an increased interest in open innovation and strategies that call for an increased collaboration between different healthcare actors, there is a lack of open innovation research in public contexts. Objective: This article presents the results of a review regarding the healthcare sector’s engagement in open innovation as well as constraining factors and positive outcomes of open innovation in healthcare. Method: The literature search focused on papers published in English between 2003 and 2014. Based on specified inclusion criteria, 18 articles were included. Results: Results reveal that most studies focus on inbound open innovation where external knowledge is integrated with the internal knowledge base at an initial phase of the innovation process. Innovation primarily results in products and services through innovation networks. We also identified constraining factors for open innovation in healthcare, including the complex organizations of healthcare, the need to establish routines for capturing knowledge from patients and clinicians, regulations and healthcare data laws as well as the positive outcome patient empowerment. Conclusion: The healthcare sector’s engagement in open innovation is limited, and it is necessary to perform further research with a focus on how open innovation can be managed in healthcare.

Raw Ideas in the Fuzzy Front End: Verbosity Increases Perceived Creativity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura J. Kornish ◽  
Sharaya M. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
Scale Evaluation ◽  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Front End ◽  
The Relationship

At the “fuzzy front end” of an innovation process, organizations typically consider dozens, or even hundreds, of raw ideas. Selecting the best ones is a double challenge: evaluating so many ideas is a large undertaking, and the ideas in their raw form permit only noisy evaluations. In this paper, we demonstrate a further challenge to that large-scale evaluation of raw ideas. We show that verbosity raises the evaluation of ideas, that is, ideas expressed in more words are rated higher. This relationship is especially pronounced for ratings of creativity. Theory tells us that the effect of length on creativity is compounded because length cues both components of creativity—novelty and usefulness. We demonstrate how effort in reading (disfluency) and perceptions of complexity work together to explain the relationship between length and creativity. Our findings provide simple but important new directives for improving the use of crowdsourcing in the practice and study of innovation: either standardize the length of the ideas or control for length in their evaluation. Overall, we urge care with using measures of novelty or creativity when the idea descriptions vary in length.

The Fuzzy Front End: Concept Development in the Automotive Industry

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christer W. Elverum ◽  
Torgeir Welo ◽  
Martin Steinert
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Automotive Industry ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
New Product ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Front End

The fuzzy front end (FFE) of new product development (NPD) is a term that refers to the early stages of the innovation process. This paper investigates the FFE in the automotive industry and addresses the challenges of working in this phase of the innovation process, as well as the academic definition of the FFE relative to the real world. Two parts of the innovation process have been identified and characterized as FFE: the concept-work within satellite front-end departments and the work within the pre-development phase of the vehicle new product development process. It has been identified that one of the greatest challenges related to working in the FFE is developing viable concepts that will “sell” internally. Estimating and conveying the overall value of the final product in terms of costs and customer benefits are two of the key elements that make it difficult to achieve internal “buy in”. Furthermore, it is argued that the most common academic perception of the FFE seem to be inadequate since it only concerns work that ends with a go/no-go decision whether to continue into development or not. Consequently, it fails to capture early-stage development work of transformational innovations, where the decision of development has already been made and the uncertainty is related to the execution of the work — and — not the outcome. Semi-structured interviews with a total of eleven employees at seven different automotive OEMs form the basis for the conclusions made herein.

MANAGING INTER-FIRM COLLABORATION IN THE FUZZY FRONT-END: STRUCTURE AS A TWO-EDGED SWORD

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (01) ◽  
pp. 145-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACOB HÖJ JÖRGENSEN ◽  
CARSTEN BERGENHOLTZ ◽  
RENÉ CHESTER GODUSCHEIT ◽  
ERIK STAVNSAGER RASMUSSEN
Keyword(s):  
Initial Phase ◽  
Innovation Management ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
Innovation Network ◽  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Front End

Literature on innovation emphasises the potential for organisations to collaborate and network instead of carrying out innovation individually. Integrating suppliers, customers and other organisations into the innovation process is perceived as a key to success in innovation management (Chesbrough, 2003). Furthermore, the management of the initial phase of the innovation process has proven vital to the overall innovation success (Kim and Wilemon, 2002a,b). Although the merits of network-based innovations are widely acknowledged, the managerial challenges of the initial integration of external organisations in an innovation network are somewhat neglected in the literature. The aim of this paper is hence to address the challenges that an organisation faces when integrating a plurality of suppliers, customers and other organisations into the Fuzzy Front End of the innovation process.

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