Cheap Marketing Shop

  • Subscribe to our RSS feed.
  • Twitter
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Facebook
  • Digg

Tuesday, 25 July 2006

What in hell is the fuzzy front end?

Posted on 10:04 by Unknown
No, it's not a new way to customize Honda Civics. According to the Product Development and Management Association, the Fuzzy Front End is a model describing what happens in the earliest stages of new product creation.

So "front end" is taken care of. Now, why "fuzzy"? Because it's unpredictable, nonsequential, inconsistent and hard to measure. That being said, there's an increasing belief that this phase can be improved, and through such improvement great leaps can be made in increasing the returns from new products and services.

The article linked above describes the fuzzy front end and a way to formalize (to the extent something fuzzy can be formalized) the model to provide more consistency and predictability in companies' product creation efforts.

First, some important definitions from the article:
  • Opportunity: A business or technology gap, that a company or individual realizes, that exists between the current situation and an envisioned future in order to capture competitive advantage, respond to a threat, solve a problem, or ameliorate a difficulty.
  • Idea: The most embryonic form of a new product or service. It often consists of a high-level view of the solution envisioned for the problem identified by the opportunity.
  • Concept: Has a well-defined form, including both a written and visual description, that includes its primary features and customer benefits combined with a broad understanding of the technology needed.
To be continued...

marketing, innovation, product development, strategy
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to Facebook
Posted in innovation, marketing, product development, strategy, what-in-hell-is | No comments
Newer Post Older Post Home

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Popular Posts

  • PGA Tour has lost its sense...of branding
    Sports marketing has been careening toward the cliff of excess for some time now (the wall-to-wall corporate sponsorship depicted in " ...
  • Bookselling: it's a distribution game now
    Seen books in any strange places lately? As the New York Times discusses in today's paper , nontraditional outlets for books are proving...
  • Worst practices in customer service #2
    The final step in completing our house renovation project is installing new smoke detectors, motion sensors and door & window sensors to...
  • Spoken blogging in action
    Last month, I wrote about a new speech-to-text service that allows you to speak your blog posts into an ordinary telephone. Now I've got...
  • Airships 101 with Doug McFadden
    OK, class, today we're going to talk about blimps, also known as airships, with Doug McFadden, a longtime blimp pilot (and my brother-in...
  • Heard on the floor - futurethink's workshop was excellent
    Two separate people at the Fortune Innovation Forum told me they loved the futurethink breakout session "Food for Thought Workshop....
  • Friday comix - open innovation
    innovation , strategy , open innovation , Friday Comix
  • Gary Hamel's keynote
    [October 2007 - see an updated post on "The Future of Management" here .] Gary's topic is: What is the future of management? H...
  • Goodbye to another innovator
    I learned in this New York Times article that Peter McColough, a longtime CEO and chairman of Xerox , died last week. (UPDATE: The Wall St...
  • Business bloggers, stop relying on Godin and Kawasaki for your material
    A Friday-afternoon rant TM Is anyone else getting tired of the many business blogs that lard themselves with reductive copies of Seth Godin...

Categories

  • adoption
  • alliances
  • awards
  • blogging
  • blogs
  • branding
  • change management
  • communications
  • Harvard Business Review
  • innovation
  • leadership
  • lists
  • management
  • marketing
  • mobile
  • mvno
  • narrative
  • negotiation
  • New York Times
  • obituaries
  • open innovation
  • PDMA
  • presentation
  • private label
  • product development
  • promotion
  • psychology
  • reading list
  • retail
  • sales
  • spoken blogging
  • spoken post
  • sponsorship
  • sports
  • storytelling
  • strategy
  • technology
  • telecommunications
  • Wall Street Journal
  • what-in-hell-is
  • wireless

Blog Archive

  • ►  2007 (69)
    • ►  March (11)
    • ►  February (30)
    • ►  January (28)
  • ▼  2006 (157)
    • ►  December (23)
    • ►  November (36)
    • ►  October (26)
    • ►  September (27)
    • ►  August (15)
    • ▼  July (17)
      • Open innovation and alliances
      • Awaiting user innovation in business software markets
      • Corporate blogging part 2
      • What in hell is the fuzzy front end?
      • When good deals go bad
      • Corporate blogging - what is it good for?
      • Open innovation
      • Computer models outperform humans in decision-maki...
      • How much is that software worth, anyhow?
      • Finally, a well-reasoned, and reasonable, net neut...
      • Farewell, Professor Levitt
      • How do you market & sell a product that isn't a pr...
      • GE uses "net promoter score" to measure customer s...
      • Search-engine advertising - benefits and drawbacks
      • To close, a purchaser must be ready, willing and able
      • Ending the war between sales and marketing
      • It's like Christmas in July
    • ►  June (13)
Powered by Blogger.

About Me

Unknown
View my complete profile