Balanced innovation front end measurement: Discontinuous innovation approach

The front-end phase is in the literature generally regarded as the most critical phase of the innovation process. This is due to its inherent uncertain and ambiguous nature and its significant potential to improve overall innovation capability in industrial firms. The front-end phase precedes and feeds the new product development project phase by creating a continuous stream of new incremental, discontinuous and radical product concepts. Such a comprehensive measurement system dealing with the front-end phase of innovation process in the discontinuous context makes it possible for the people responsible for the innovation activities to get a picture of the efficiency of innovation process front-end and effectiveness of outcomes and impacts. This paper describes conceptually the theoretical backgrounds, a tentative idea and first managerial implications of a method, Balanced Innovation Front-End Measurement BIFEM, we are going to develop and test in 30 Finnish, German and USA companies during next two years.