Exploring the Role of the Customer in the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation

<p>The early stages of development for new advanced technologies are notoriously difficult to navigate and manage effectively in such a way that leads to successful commercial application. This paper explores how the use of flexible and exploratory frameworks based in customer engagement can provide valuable insights into how advanced technologies can be developed to solve validated market problems. The paper reflects on the challenges faced and lessons taken from our practical experience using this approach to develop advanced technologies emerging from within Victoria University of Wellington.</p>

Exploring the Role of the Customer in the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation

<p>The early stages of development for new advanced technologies are notoriously difficult to navigate and manage effectively in such a way that leads to successful commercial application. This paper explores how the use of flexible and exploratory frameworks based in customer engagement can provide valuable insights into how advanced technologies can be developed to solve validated market problems. The paper reflects on the challenges faced and lessons taken from our practical experience using this approach to develop advanced technologies emerging from within Victoria University of Wellington.</p>

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

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.

A FUZZY FRONT-END PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK FOR START-UPS

Start-ups tend to form with a central idea that differentiates them from their competitors in the market. It is crucial for them to efficiently transform the idea into a marketable product. Prototyping helps to iteratively achieve a minimum viable product and plays a crucial role by enabling teams to test their ideas with limited resources early on. However, the prototyping process may have wrong focus leading to a suboptimal allocation of resources. Previously, we proposed role-based prototyping for fuzzy front-end development in small teams. It supports (1) resource allocation, (2) the definition of responsibilities, and (3) structuring the development process with milestones. In recent research this was a promising yet incomplete approach. We extend the previous work by refining the prototyping process by adding a prototyping matrix with two dimensions (purpose and lens), a prototyping cycle (plan, execute, test, reflect, assimilate), and a modified Kanban board (Protoban) for planning, managing, and reflecting cycles. This process, named PETRA was tested with a start-up developing an autonomous trash picking robot. The extended approach supported the team significantly in providing a clear idea of what to do at what time.

WHAT IS SUCCESSFUL PROTOTYPING? INSIGHTS FROM NOVICE DESIGNERS’ SELF-EVALUATION OF PROTOTYPING SUCCESS

Prototyping is essential for fuzzy front-end product development. The prototyping process answers questions about critical assumptions and supports design decisions, but it is often unstructured and context-dependent. Previously, we showed how to guide novice designers in early development stages with prototyping milestones. Here, we studied the prototyping success perceived by novice design teams. This was done in two steps: (1) teams were asked to assign each prototype to a milestone, a specific purpose, a fidelity level, and a human-centered design lens, and then evaluate the success using a predefined set of criteria. (2) Teams were interviewed about the success of the prototyping process, this time using self-chosen criteria. Results related to (1) show that teams perceived prototyping activities with respect to desirability and problem validation significantly less successful than prototyping activities towards feasibility and solution validation. Results related to (2) show that teams mostly chose success criteria related to how well prototypes supported communication, decision making, learning, and tangibility. This insight may be used to give priorities to further improvement of methods and guidance in these areas.

Illuminating Opportunities for Smart Tourism Innovation that Foster Sustainable Tourist Well-Being Using Q Methodology

Technology innovation has become one of the driving forces that advance the tourism industry, but the industry has yet to account for the manner in which personal technologies can foster tourists’ sustainable well-being. Generating innovation that promotes the sustainable well-being of individuals is deemed to be challenging because the experience needs to account for users’ psychological well-being and their attitudes towards technology. A holistic apprehension of these needs, which requires multidisciplinary perspectives, can help designers to identify design spaces for further design investigations at the fuzzy front-end of innovation. Hence, the goal of this study is to identify design opportunities for smart tourism innovation that foster sustainable tourist well-being by using Q methodology to gather participants’ attitudes on the future use of such technology. The study involved 43 participants ranking 46 statements derived from the extant literature. The results show four opinion clusters related to the optimal use of personal technologies for sustainable tourist well-being. These clusters, which highlight both hedonic and eudaimonic user experience considerations, provide directions for designers for developing innovations that promote well-being. Recommendations of using Q as an exploratory design research method are discussed.

AI-based audit of fuzzy front end innovation using ISO56002

Purpose This paper aims to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) audit tool for auditing text-based evidence and determine its efficiency and effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach A manual audit checklist and an AI audit tool are developed with fuzzy front-end (FFE) from Innovation Management System Standard (IMSS) as the audit scope, First, a manual audit of five organisations is conducted to determine their compliance scores. The transcripts of the audit are recorded which are used by the AI audit tool to assign compliance scores for the same organisations. The effectiveness and efficiency of the AI audit tool are determined by comparing their results with the manual audit. Findings This paper demonstrates the development of the FFE AI audit tool which led to 92% improved efficiency while being 95% effective compared to a human auditor. Practical implications The publication of new financial and non-financial standards (such as ISO56002: IMSS) have implications for internal auditing (IA). The scope of IA must expand to include new standards while remaining efficient. Emerging technologies, such as AI help achieve this. Even though the use of AI in financial auditing is widely studied, it has not received similar attention in non-financial auditing. This paper develops a non-financial AI audit tool to audit an essential component of the IMSS, the FFE of innovation and determine its efficiency and effectiveness. Originality/value The study develops an FFE AI audit tool for the first time. The methodology used has practical and academic implications for the use of AI in non-financial auditing.