Opening the fuzzy front end: A synthesis of two theories

Companies must innovate, today and tomorrow. The ability to provide new products and solutions to the markets is critical for maintaining a continuous revenue stream, especially in this age of fundamental changes. Product development processes have been studied since 80s and nearing 90s academic attention turned to early phases of development, i.e. fuzzy front-end. Activities at the fuzzy front end of product development process are often chaotic and experimental with rather unpredictable or uncertain commercialization future. Opportunities are raising, but a firm still cannot do all needed development actions in-house. The theory of open innovation has tackled some of emerged dilemmas. It proposes that one should open knowledge and technology borders of the company for idea exchange, because there might be better business model for the technology that apparently is not valuable for you. In our paper OI and FFE theories are merged to introduce a framework for parallel business plan and technology development, leading to new discoveries in the relation between FFE and external technology exploitation. The framework is evaluated by how it can help organizations to improve their product development profitability by coping with in- and out-flows of technology.