Opening Up The Fuzzy Front-End Of Service Process Innovation: Searching Capability, Co-Development Capacity, And IT Competence

The innovation process can be viewed as a two-stage model being comprised of “fuzzy front-end” (FFE) and “project execution”. The former is the focus of this study. Although both opening up to the outside world and use of IT in the innovation process have been suggested to have a positive impact on innovation performance by the literature, little effort has been put into studying both issues in the front-end phase. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to address these gaps. In doing so, we develop a theoretical model and related hypotheses to examine the impact of the FFE team’s openness capabilities and IT competence on the performance of the FFE phase of service process innovation (SPI) projects measured in terms of market and technical uncertainty reduction as well as on the overall effectiveness of the SPI projects. This research is expected to make several contributions to the literature on innovation management and information systems (IS) management by providing new insights into how openness can improve the front-end process as well as how IT can facilitate a more open and collaborative approach to the FFE phase.