Managing the Front End of your Innovation Process

Front End Innovation (FEI) is one of the top innovation management challenges of our times. The notion that FEI is fuzzy and uncontrollable is being replaced with the belief that it should now be managed in a systematic way to ensure that ideas are created based on informed scenarios and opportunities with relevant customer insights. However, there are a number of different methods to adapt and knowing which one to implement can be challenging for organisations. This post illustrates a snap shot of Geoff Waite’s NOIC (Needs, Opportunities, Ideas and Concepts) and SPROC (Strategy, Process, Resources, Organisation and Culture) frameworks, which are a combination of practicing (NOIC) and managing (SPROC) the front end of innovation.

How do you manage the front end of your innovation process? 

NOIC is a simple model that progresses through phases as the anagram presents. By starting with a need discovery phase that utilises a combination of hunting grounds to discover current, unmet and potential future needs in the market, companies can create a solid foundation by which to advance into identifying opportunity spaces. Voice of the Customer techniques are very useful in delving into the hunting grounds, to unearth customer unmet and hidden needs that feed into the opportunity phase. From the assessment of the opportunities within the identified needs, a selection of creative ideas and prioritisation of potential approaches can be made, which leads into concept development. The main premise of this model is to identify needs and opportunities before creating ideas and concepts (many organisations do this the backwards and therefore struggle to create any meaningful ideas and concepts for the market place).

SPROC framework illustrates five themes to managing innovation:

1. Resources encompass aspects such as people, team building, work space and   environments and the location of offices either regionally or globally.
2. Strategy ensures that work within FEI is aligned to the overall corporate strategy of the organisation and fits within the company’s portfolio of products and services.
3. Process is focused on facilitating an FEI initiative to create winning ideas, promote knowledge sharing, idea capturing schemes and the mind-set of seeking to continuously improvement the current process and ways of working.
4. Organisation is based on project management, T-shaped managers, how internal networks and Business Units flourish and how management incentivise employees with reward and recognition schemes. 
5. Culture, without this aspect, FEI initiatives will struggle to grow into a successful and thriving element of any organisation, as culture is what underlies how we act and react. An innovative culture seeks to encourage openness, enables interactions, uses engaging environments and in some ways the most importantly; encourages learning, which sometimes can be through failure.

A combination of practicing and managing FEI is a structured and considered way to formulate your FEI activities so that you are maximising the ability to create winning concepts to feed into the development funnel. The foundations of the process, such as culture and people should be highly regarding and worth spending quality time to ensure that you foster a culture for innovation and employ and develop your workforce to adopt the mind-set and attitude to succeed with FEI.