The ‘Fuzzy Front End’ of business is a firm’s new value creation nursery. The ‘Fuzzy Front End’ is the process that starts with the identification of an unmet customer need and the convergence on the optimum solution that a firm can repeatably produce and sell profitably in new or competitive markets. It is also the least understood, most unpredictable, and uncertain business operating process. Firm’s that do this well exploit the new value creation process for sustained growth and new sources of competitive advantage. Firm’s that don’t have an effective new value creation process struggle to survive. Risk adverse managers avoid strategic options that involve business investments in the ‘Fuzzy Front End’.

A key question for management then is how to setup and efficiently/effectively operate a new value nursery that reliability generates sustained growth and new sources of competitive advantage for the firm?

The Fuzzy Front End

The ‘Fuzzy Front End’ is where new opportunities are born, developed, assessed, nurtured, and begin their life as a source of value for the firm. New opportunities are born when an unmet customer need is identified. Often vague or poorly articulated ideas, the unmet customer need requires further development to clarify the new opportunity. Once clarified, a multi-functional team of specialists comprising marketing, product engineering, and designers set about to develop a solution to satisfy the unmet customer need in terms of price, quality, performance, and other appropriate characteristics. The ‘Fuzzy Front End’ is fuelled by creativity, innovation, insight, and customer awareness.

An efficient/effective ‘Fuzzy Front End’ requires the integration of marketing, product development, and business processes. While marketing processes are well understood product development and engineering is often not well understood. The lean engineering framework provides a repeatable process for product engineering to align with the marketing process. Together integrated marketing/lean engineering framework forms an innovation process.  The challenge in achieving an efficient/effective ‘Fuzzy Front End’ rests in the fact that the start and end points are subject to ambiguity. The ambiguity in start and end points is what differentiates the ‘Fuzzy Front End’ process from all other repeatable business processes. Understanding the nature of the start and end points is a critical first step in setting up an efficient/effective new value nursery.

Ambiguous Start Point

Viewed in the context of the lean engineering framework the start point for the ‘Fuzzy Front End’, the unmet customer need, is subject to ambiguity in that a priori the firm can’t be certain that the need is valid or even exists. Sources of ambiguity in the unmet customer need include unstated wants, values, or needs that the customer did not even know that had because no product exists currently in the market today.

Timothy Schipper and Mark Swets in their book Innovative Lean Development say that the goal at the starting point is to express stated/unstated customer needs “accurately and in a form that the design team can understand and directly apply to the project….and this requires a method that allows the team to use the same vocabulary as the users when expressing the values that the solution must apply. The method must also expose the gaps between the problems and potential solutions.”  Schipper and Swets see the ‘Fuzzy Front End’ as a process of closing the user gaps.

Ambiguous End Point

The end point, convergence on an optimum solution, involves decisions, trade-offs, and selection from amongst multiple (if-not infinite) alternatives. The resulting optimum solution is also subject to ambiguity in that a priori the firm can’t sure that the solution with be desired by customers. Sources of ambiguity leading to the convergence on an optimum solution include what price the customer is willing to pay, what combination or set of features hits the customer’s sweat spot, what technologies and building blocks should be selected to form the product, how the product should be manufactured, and how the product should be delivered and services along the entire product life-cycle.

The Process In-Between

The ‘Fuzzy Front End’ process between the ambiguous start and end points is knowledge based work that involves risk, uncertainty, novelty, experimentation, complexity, creativity, and non-routine work. As much as possible the goal is to establish an effective/efficient process although at the detail level may not be as repeatable as operations execution processes that exist in production or service. Various lean product development methods are available for an effective/efficient ‘Fuzzy Front End’ process.