Structuring the early Fuzzy Front-End to manage Ideation for New Product Development Andreas Riel a,b , Martin Neumann a,c , Serge Tichkiewitch (1) a, b a G-SCOP Laboratory, Grenoble Institute of Technology, Grenoble, France b EMIRAcle AISBL Research Association, Brussels, Belgium c KSPG AG, Neuss, Germany This paper presents the creation of a reference stage-gate process model for ideation activities in the early fuzzy front-end of New Product Development (NPD). The work is based on a unique empirical approach that combines the results from NPD research with insights gained from expert interviews of key innovation stakeholders in industry in order to come up with a list of key success factors for the ideation process. These factors provide the pillars for the design of an ideation reference process model from which company- specific ideation processes can be derived taking into account the organisation’s specific context and innovation culture. Product development, Decision making, Innovation management 1. Introduction Within the entire innovation process, composed of the so-called Fuzzy Front-End (FFE), the New Product Development (NPD) and the commercialisation [1], idea generation and selection (i.e., decision making) happens in the early and typically unstructured phase of innovation. The management of ideas in the FFE is a very challenging mission for innovation management because decisions made in the front-end largely determine not only the outcome of the innovation process—the innovations—but also the involved costs, time frame and the resources needed for conducting the process [2]. Hence, the quality of ideas and the effectiveness of the evaluation methods to choose the “right” ideas in the front-end largely influence the subsequent stages of NPD and commercialisation. Many companies fail to master the initial phase of their innovation activities in a satisfying manner, and stress the particular need of acting more systematically and with a more systemic approach in this early phase of ideation. The target of the research underlying this paper is to propose an ideation stage- gate reference process model based on a set of key success factors identified from literature and expert interviews. The proposed model capitalises on the systematic involvement of internal and external stakeholders in ideation, intrinsically following the Open Innovation paradigm [3]. Section 2 of this paper describes the research objective and its positioning in the academic context. Section 3 presents the methodology, while Section 4 is devoted to the discussion of the principal research results. Section 5 briefly reports about the application of the results within the corporate environment of the German automotive Tier 1 supplier KSPG AG. Section 6 concludes and gives an outlook on research perspectives. 2. Target Description Numerous works published by members of the associations CIRP, Design Society and EMIRAcle on the design of products and services have demonstrated the importance of the upstream phase of the development process [4], [5]. The fuzzy front-end can be seen as the very beginning of all processes in a company, as any design is rooted in one or more ideas. Current NPD research results attempting to propose a systematic, manageable structure for NPD activities assume that such ideas are already available and accepted for implementation. The same applies to Management Sciences dealing with the economic aspects of innovations. Social Sciences focus on creativity without taking into account the elaboration of ideas and their propagation in the process to the gate into the NPD process. There is thus a clear gap in research situated in processes and methods for systematic ideation upfront the NPD. The presented research attempts to give a contribution to bridging this gap by proposing a structured and process-oriented approach that supports process-driven companies in increasing the quality and quantity of successful ideas for product/service/process innovations. It shall be underlined that this goes beyond idea management, which is nowadays predominated by the corporate suggestion system and/or the continuous improvement process (Kaizen). Structuring the ideation phase of the FFE shall help make this phase manageable by integrating it into the stage-gate process- oriented process landscapes that characterise most corporate organisations of the occidental hemisphere. Here, the major evident challenges are the following: 1. To define an ideation process sufficiently structured to allow assessment and improvement, yet lightweight enough to leverage the dynamics and creativity intrinsic to ideation. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect CIRP Annals Manufacturing Technology Journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cirp