Shaping an Integrative Front End of Innovation (FEI) in a Design Science Approach

The Front End of Innovation (FEI) has a vital role in influencing the development and commercialization of new products and services. This initial phase of the innovation process is acknowledged as an important driver of positive results for new products and for the success of businesses. The FEI is a multidisciplinary area that includes a variety of activities, such as opportunity issues and ideation, analysis regarding technical feasibility, market research, financial viability analysis, business model development, and business plan preparation. Due to the number and variety of FEI responsibilities, this phase entails a considerable level of complexity and crucial decisions. This fact is reflected in the literature, where one finds a variety of FEI approaches and works, seldom overlapping, and consequently hampering the development of a common reference model and language for the FEI. This research aimed at putting forward a Front End of Innovation Integrative Ontology (FEI2O) as a comprehensive knowledge representation of the FEI. The FEI2O is a domain model as it explicitly provides a description of a domain regarding: concepts, properties and relations of concepts. Moreover, it defines a common vocabulary and a shared understanding. Therefore, the FEI2O offers a consistent contribution to the FEI. The present research follows a multi-disciplinary methodological approach. It employs a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, having a so-called mixed approach. This study adopts the Design Science due to the nature of the FEI and the proposed research problem, which addresses the development of a comprehensive and integrative knowledge representation of the Front End of Innovation. The research frameworks from Hevner et al. (2004) and March & Smith (1995) shaped the definition of the research activities and outputs and the 101 Ontology Development Methodology (Noy and McGuinness 2001) provided the seven steps to develop the ontology, followed by a two-phase evaluation approach. The FEI Integrative Ontology (FEI2O) builds on a) FEI related literature; b) existing ontologies; c) refinement and elicitation of the artefact with domain experts and, d) a two-phase evaluation approach. The global evaluation calculated by an Attribute Agreement Analysis reached an 87.10% of approval and at a sub-ontology level the scores were: for the High-Level 85.00%; for the FEI Purpose 80.00%; for the Portfolio Planning & Management 90.00%; for the FEI Stage 92.50%; for the FEI Agile 82.50%; and, for the FEI Actors 92.50%. Furthermore, the evaluation of competence questions demonstrated that all questions were answered by the ontology. The results of the ontology evaluation indicate that the FEI2O fulfils its purpose. This is enough evidence to claim the validation of the work. Moreover, the usefulness of the model was analysed considering the instantiation of two application cases. The overarching benefit of the ontology is the proposition of a comprehensive and integrative knowledge representation of the Front End of Innovation, which enables several by-products, namely: a comprehensive tool and a supporting model to address the FEI by means of an FEI2O Canvas; and, a novel approach to look at Entrepreneurship Education.