Taking the Fuzziness Out of the Fuzzy Front End

OVERVIEW:The portion of the new product development cycle between when work on a new idea could start and when it actually starts—the so-called Fuzzy Front End—is often lengthy, typically poorly understood, and usually full of opportunities for improvement. Consequently, there are substantial benefits to analyzing this stage quantitatively. In particular, such analysis sheds light on many important decisions regarding the structural design of the early development process. A key implication of such analysis is that front-end process structure should differ depending on the underlying economics of the specific situation. This in turn suggests that there are no universally applicable “best practices” for optimizing the Fuzzy Front End.