Understanding Managers Decision Making Process for Tools Selection in the Core Front End of Innovation

New product development (NPD) describes the process of bringing a new product or service to the market. The Fuzzy Front End (FFE) of Innovation is the term describing the activities happening before the product development phase of NPD. In the FFE of innovation, several tools are used to facilitate and optimise the activities. To select these tools, managers of the product development team have to use several premises to decide upon which tool is more appropriate to which activity. This paper proposes an approach to model the decision making process of the managers. The results underline the dimensions influencing the decision process before a certain tool is chosen, and how those tools impact the performance of cost, time and efficiency. In order to achieve this, five companies participated for the data collection. Interesting trends and differences emerge from the analysis of the data in hand, and several hypotheses are tested. A preliminary version of a theoretical model depicting the decision process of managers during tools selection in the FFE is proposed. The theoretical model is built from the constructed hypotheses.