This is the first of a series of blog posts dedicated to the integration of customers, lead users and experts into your front end innovation process.

A lot has been written about open innovation and crowdsourcing in the past decade, but only since a few years companies (especially B2C) have really begun to bring open innovation into practice. Today the trend towards opening up the front end of innovation is undeniable, and it is encouraging companies to start thinking about different kinds of external involvement in their innovation processes.

Why this trend towards openness?

There are several reasons why companies might decide to open up their innovation front end, and some of them are sales or marketing oriented. Obviously, an open policy towards innovation and co-creation will help to build trust and maintain a good relationship with your customers, as well as enforce a positive image of openness and social responsibility for your company. But the most important reason for opening up the fuzzy front end of innovation is related to the very nature of it: fuzziness. Managing the risks caused by technical and market uncertainties in the front end innovation process is a major challenge for every innovation manager.

Opening up the front end will allow your company to capture ‘consumer insights’ from within its ecosystem.  Consumer insights can either bring your company information about the needs of its customers – in which case we call them market insights – or they can give information about your solution (i.e. the way you address these needs) – in which case we call them product insights. Good knowledge about your customers’ needs or the level of satisfaction with current solutions will enable your company to reduce the uncertainties about the market acceptance or the technical feasibility of new ideas or concepts in the fuzzy front end.

Capturing and analysing customer insights through open innovation will provide your company with the intelligence it needs to take smarter decisions in all consecutive steps of the innovation process: from ideation, conceptualization and development to final commercialisation.

 In the next blog post, we will discuss different approaches to organising external involvement and how to choose between them.

Posted by Wim Soens
Senior Innovation Architect at CogniStreamer