Ideas in the Workplace: A New Approach Towards Organizing the Fuzzy Front End of the Innovation Process

This article pinpoints requirements for organizing the fuzzy front end of the innovation process. The author derived the conditions for computer-aided idea management from benchmarking the fuzzy front ends of several German and European companies and proposes differentiating between general and company-specific requirements for organizing the fuzzy front end. It is suggested that structuring the fuzzy front end involves low financial investment but highly sensitive and transparent leadership. Using specific properties of ideas in the workplace as springboards, considerations on further new requirements for successful idea management are developed. Placing a particular emphasis on the interface between the idea owner and the idea-adoption system, an "idea types" model is developed, which defines four different extreme types of employees and their inclinations to solve problems. An extended set of requirements for managing ideas in the workplace as a useful instrument in creation and implementation of idea-pipelines in companies and in checking software programmes for idea management or the early stages of new product development programmes is presented.