Most companies have come to realize that in order to remain in business, and especially, gain economic success, they need to be able to identify user needs and respond to those needs. The set of activities that takes place before the actual product development, the fuzzy front-end, plays a critical role in the competition of whose products meet user needs the best. The main characteristics of t...

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The innovation process may be divided into three areas: the Fuzzy Front End (FFE), the New Product Development Portion (NPD) and commercialization as indicated in the figure 1. Most projects, once the concept is defined in the FFE, are managed in the NPD portion using the traditional “Stage GateTM” (Cooper, 2001) process. However, three separate strategies and processes are typically involved i...

Natural phenomena that are imaged using remote sensing satellite data can be reconstructed in 3-D. This process can be accomplished either by active or passive methods. The active methods interfere with the reconstructed phenomena, either mechanically or radiometrically. The radiometric methods reconstruct the 3-D from the reflected or backscattered information about the specific objects or phe...

In this paper, we study the fuzzy front-end (FFE) of innovation in the context of temporary virtual project teams (VPTs). We argue that despite the importance of innovation for today’s organizations, and the prevalence of VPTs in most industries, there are no studies examining how the innovation process plays out in this context. We draw on two temporary VPTs (Saint-Germain and Los Innovadores)...