Part 1
OPEN INNOVATION IN THE FUZZY FRONT END

The fuzzy front end of innovation is that messy, chaotic part of the innovation process before a product concept has been ideated or developed. This part of the process seeks new opportunities for the firm—whether they derive from a technology capability, a specific market insight, or changing trends in customer needs or competitors. The goal for this stage is to find an interesting problem to solve, invent the solution, or find someone else who already has invented that solution, and eliminate the technical, market, and competitive unknowns sufficiently to move the project forward into the firm's formal development process. Part 1 contains two chapters, which provide information that will allow you to spot opportunities that arise from technology, market, and general trends.

• Manfred Stadlbauer and Gerhard Drexler focus on finding and using sources of technology capabilities that are external to the firm in Chapter 1. This chapter shows how to use the patent literature and social network analysis to find areas of technology in the early stages of development, uncover interconnections between those new technologies and other technologies, locate firms and individuals active in those technologies, and map their geographic location to help determine who might make appropriate technology development partners.
• Christiane Rau, Fiona Schweitzer and Oliver Gassmann present methods for using open foresight workshops to identify new opportunities for the firm. Rather than being merely technology-driven opportunities, these methods allow the firm to investigate at the overall market and general trends level. Chapter 2 shows firms how they can implement these types of workshops in “closed” or internally executed forms, but then also shows firms how to move step-by-step to using them in more and more open ways.