Innovation and Ontologies

38 Roadmap for the Fuzzy Front End
� For this thesis, a method50 is defined as orderly process or procedure, according to which
particular activities are performed in order to achieve a given objective 51 .
Although countless tools and methods are available, they are rarely implemented to support the
innovation process 52 (Viertlboeck, 2000). In their study on adoption rates of best practices in new
product development, Dooley and partners found that during front end it is only 36% (compared
to 58% of adoption in the area of goals and strategy) (Dooley, Subra & Anderson, 2002).
Especially SME adopt methods only rarely. This has been shown by studies on the relation
between company size and deployment of methods (Bonaccorsi & Manfredi, 1999; Braun, 2005;
Gausemeier, 2000).
Especially methods which target only particular phases of the process (e.g. the Fuzzy Front End)
are poorly implemented and rather considered as ‘supplementary’ by practitioners (Araujo et al.,
1996; Ehrlenspiel, 2007; Gausemeier, 2000; Grabowski & Geiger, 1997; Meyer, 2000).
Literature lists a number of reasons for this state which provide interesting insights going far
beyond the scope of this subsection (Braun, 2005; Guenther, 1998; Hutterer, 2005; Meyer, 2000;
Reinicke, 2004; Stetter, 2000; Viertlboeck, 2000). The most prominent reasons identified by
academia are summarized in figure 16; attention is drawn particularly to the argument of the
difficulty in selecting a method (bold box).
figure 16 Reasons of poor use of methods to support innovation management
50 Following IEEE Computer Society (1990), a methodology is “a comprehensive, integrated series of techniques or methods creating a general
systems theory of how a class of thought-intensive work ought to be performed”, a method is a set of “orderly process or procedure used in
the engineering of a product or performing a service” and a technique is “a technical and managerial procedure used to achieve a given
objective”.
51 In accordance with literature, my definition merges the IEEE nomenclature of method and technique, renouncing on the use of the latter (IEEE
Computer Society, 1990). This reduces terminological confusion (Braun, 2005; Ehrlenspiel, 2007; Eversheim, 2003; Lindemann, 2007).
52 An exception from the rule are integrated methods transferred from other fields of management, like project management or quality
management. They have already been integrated as standard tools in the management of innovations (Ehrlenspiel, 2007; Eversheim, 2003).