Addressing the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation in an Innovative Manner

For decades innovation has been of the utmost importance in all areas of life and economy. Therefore, we can hardly say it is a new concept. However, in spite of the amount of talk about innovation, many organisations, especially smaller ones would rather avoid innovation than make it part of their daily routine. We can observe in companies nationally and internationally a lack of experts in innovation management, but even more troublesome is the lack of acknowledgment of the importance of innovation processes. To innovate means carrying out the entire process that starts with defining the problem and ends with a successful implementation of innovations into practice. The so-called idea management, which is the first phase of innovation, is often formalised especially in larger enterprises, but it is rarely supported with appropriate and sustainable activities. Focusing innovation activities primarily on the creation of ideas may be somewhat problematic as it goes hand in hand with less or even no focus on the perception of problems and opportunities. It is clear that the "fuzzy front end" or the pre-invention phase is one of the key steps to a successful innovation. This phenomena, however, is not only present in companies, but has been detected in theory - contemporary literature, as well. A thorough scan of different sources shows that rare studies pay due attention to this stage despite its vital role in the innovation process: the aspect of problem with regard to the pre-invention phase is rarely exposed in the literature (see e.g. Deppe et al. 2002; Hüsig and Kohn 2003; Sperry and Jetter 2009; Breuer, Hewing, and Steinhoff 2009; Verworn, Herstatt, and Nagahira 2008). By performing a search within Google Scholar with phrases "front end of innovation" and adding "problem", "opportunity" and "idea" separately, we discovered that bibliography regarding the element of problem in innovation is over 6-times fewer than bibliography regarding opportunity and about 13-times fewer than bibliography regarding the element of idea. We discovered a similar ratio with references in different on-line publications' databases when searching sources regarding specific methods for working with problems, opportunities or ideas. These findings were translated into a challenge whether and how it would be possible to bring the innovation process, especially it's front end, closer to small and medium-sized (and large) enterprises as well as academics in innovation management. We prepared a carefully selected range of methods to manage the pre-invention phase, which may be selected easily by using an innovation "semaphore" especially developed for this purpose. The selected methods are operationally manageable, both timewise and in terms of preparation and organisation, and are comprehensively presented with a description of contents, implementation of process, and examples of good practice. This paper focuses primarily on presenting the semaphore and the selection of methods and the principle of their presentation as a possibility of establishing practical and theoretical learning in managing the preinvention phase.