In the light of depleting natural resources and growing awareness for responsible consumption, "Cradle-to-Cradle" (C2C) has emerged as one of the key concepts redefining product characteristics and assigning a new role to environmental responsibility of companies. It reframes the general goal of...

Our study focuses on the question, whether users should be intensively involved in the innovation process of radical product innovations or better not - from the manufacturer's perspective. Radical innovations incorporate new technologies, shift market structures, require intensive user learning...

In this paper, we are going to report on the results of an exploratory piece of research about the typical front-end-related activities in 28 innovation projects carried out by 14 German and 13 Japanese companies to reduce project uncertainty. In all cases we observed a range of activities to...

In this paper, we report the complete and unabridged results of an exploratory study of typical front-end activities in 28 innovation projects in German and Japanese companies. We further reveal differences in the practice of innovation management in both countries. Based on these, we develop...

In a study of New Product Development (NPD) projects, the fuzzy front end of innovation is explored. The New Product Development process is a multistage process. Therefore, the study examines two sorts of impact that the fuzzy front end has on the success of New Product Development: a direct...