Taking the fuzziness out of the fuzzy front end

The portion of the new product development cycle between when work on a new idea could start and when it actually starts-the so-called Fuzzy Front End -is often lengthy, typically poorly understood and usually full of opportun ities for improvement. Consequently, there are substantial benefits to anal yzing this stage quantitatively. In particular, such analysis sheds light o n many important decisions regarding the structural design of the early dev elopment process. A key implication of such analysis is that front-end proc ess structure should differ depending an the underlying economics of the sp ecific situation. This in turn suggests that there are no universally appli cable "best practices" for optimizing the Fuzzy Front End.