New Product and Service Innovation: Improving Front-End Effectiveness - Sponsored Whitepaper

As organizations better refine their product and service development processes, they increasingly turn their attention to what occurs at the front end. The old adage “garbage in, garbage out” is so true in product development. Getting better ideas and then taking them through an efficient and effective process can only improve the outputs and outcomes of the entire product or service development effort.

What are best-practice organizations doing to enhance their performance in the early stages of product development, before projects enter the better- documented, more well-defined activities that lead to commercialization?

This is obviously not a new topic to research. There are other organizations examining it, and APQC even studied it as far back as 1998. However, it continues to remain a challenge for organizations around the world. As technology evolves and as organizations become more global and complex, the opportunities to improve the fuzzy front end remain.