Abstract
It is common in the Management Science and Design Engineering communities to represent the processes contributing to innovation in companies as a funnel or similar variants. It is assumed it is possible to represent an analogy to the stages of planning and idea generation (the so-called fuzzy front-end), conception generation, as well as idea and concept selection to end up with the very few emerging developed and launched products and services on the market. First, this analogy may feature different innovation process layers, each of them independently as well as the entire set of these innovation process layers. After a review of literature on this funnel representation, we show that this analogy may be meaningful to globally represent and discuss about some properties of the innovation capability of a company at different locations: the R&D process as well as a given NPD process. We further describe a survey carried out within 28 large European technological companies through 48 detailed face-to-face interviews. Our questionnaire has allowed us to observe some characteristic patterns in the innovation funnels. We finally propose a model of five innovation funnels varying by their shape, permeability of emerging ideas and agility in terms of innovation management. We also hypothesize that these 5 funnels evolve in a sequential and cyclic way and that our cyclic model may be used as a questioning tool for the continuous improvement of the innovation management.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
De Brabandere L, Mikolajczak A (2002) Le plaisir des idées. Libérer, gérer et entrainer la créativité au sein des organisations”, Dunod, ISBN 210040847, Paris
Deschamps JP, Nayak PR (1995) Product juggernauts—how companies mobilize to generate a stream of market winners. Harvard Business School Press, Arthur D. Little, Inc., ISBN-10: 0875843417, Boston
Gero JS, Kazakov V (1996) An exploration based evolutionary model of a generative design process. Microcomput Civil Eng 11:209–216
Cross N (1994) Engineering design methods—strategies for product design. Wiley, Chichester
Pugh S (1990) Total design: integrated methods for successful product engineers. Addison Wesley, New York
Roozenburg NF, Eekels J (1995) Product design: fundamentals and methods. Wiley, Chichester
Liu YC, Chakrabarti A, Bligh T (2003) Towards and ‘ideal’ approach for concept generation. Des Stud 24(4):341–355
Brem A, Voigt K-I (2009) Integration of market pull and technology push in the corporate front end and innovation management—insights from German software industry. Technovation 29(5):351–367
Wheelwright SC, Clark KB (1992) Revolutionizing Product Development. Free Press, New York
Kline SJ, Rosenberg N (1986) An overview on innovation, in the positive sum strategy.In: Landau R, Rosenberg N (eds) National Academy Press, Washington, DC
Cooper RG (1990) Stage-gate system: a new tool for managing new products. Business Horizons, May–June, pp 44–55
Cooper RG (1983) A process model for industrial new product development. IEEE Trans Eng Manag 30:2–11
Cooper RG (1988) Predevelopment activities determine new product success. Ind Mark Manage 17:237–248
Pahl G, Beitz W (1984) Engineering design. The design council. Springer, London
Ulrich KT, Eppinger SD (1995) Product design and development. McGraw-Hill, New York
Cuisinier C, Vallet E, Bertoluci G, Attias D, Yannou B (2012) Un nouveau regard sur l’innovation—Un état des pratiques et des modèles organisationnels dans les grandes entreprises. Techniques de l’Ingénieur, ISBN 978-2-85059-130-3, Paris
Petrov V (2002) The laws of system evolutions. The TRIZ J, Mar 2002, paper #2, see http://www.triz-journal.com/archives/2002/03/b/index.htm.
Savransky SD (2000) Engineering of creativity—introduction to TRIZ methodology of inventive problem solving. CRC Press, Boca Raton
Motte D, Bjärnemo R, Yannou B (2011) On the interaction between the engineering design and development process models—Part I: elaborate elaborations on the generally accepted process models. In: Proceedings of ICoRD: 3rd international conference on research into design, Jan 10–12, Bangalore
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer India
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bertoluci, G., Yannou, B., Attias, D., Vallet, E. (2013). A Categorization of Innovation Funnels of Companies as a Way to Better Make Conscious Agility and Permeability of Innovation Processes. In: Chakrabarti, A., Prakash, R. (eds) ICoRD'13. Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering. Springer, India. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1050-4_57
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1050-4_57
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, India
Print ISBN: 978-81-322-1049-8
Online ISBN: 978-81-322-1050-4
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)