Measurement of design front end: Radical innovation approach

The overall structure and main characteristics of a future product are all decided in the front-end phase, which strongly affects subsequent new product development activities. Recent studies indicate that these early front-end activities represent the most troublesome phase of the innovation process and, at the same time, one of the greatest opportunities to improve a company’s overall innovation capability. In this paper dealing with criteria, we concentrate only on the objectives viewpoint and leave the attributes discussion for future research. The two most crucial questions are: What are the objectives of measurement in radical design? What are the most crucial future challenges related to the selection of relevant measurement objectives? Based on the theoretical part of this paper, our framework of the Balanced Design Front-End Model (BDFEM) for measuring the innovation activities front-end contains five assessment viewpoints; input, process, output (including i), social environment and structural environment. Based on results from our first managerial implications in three Finnish manufacturing companies, we argue that the developed model is flexible and can also be used extensively for companies other than manufacturing, like the service sector.