Abstract

Innovation is a key element for the companies’ success in the competitive environment of the world today. Innovation begins with the innovative ideas that form during the course of early stages of innovation process commonly called front end innovation (FEI). Therefore, in order to gain access to the information from various resources, especially the external ones, the front end innovation activities should be organized within the format of a systematic approach. Customers are amongst the most important sources of innovative ideas in the process of new product development that can be used by the companies. In order to take advantage of the customers’ ideas, there is a need for the existence of a model for integrating them with the intra-organizational sources. In the current research paper, a model has been proposed for the integration of the customers. The model is derived of the open innovation paradigm in a frond end innovation initiative based on forming a simultaneous blending of the customers, rivals and marginal industries for the purpose of increasing creativity and success. The suggested model has been obtained by the contributions from Ulvik Model that was developed in the agricultural tools industry for “drip irrigation systems”. The main objective of the present study is the generation of innovative product ideas and then selection of the most innovative idea (real and unsatisfied needs) by the customers in FEI phase through making use of the proposed model parallel to the reduction of new products failure rates in the market. The sample data were acquired from 30 customers in a field study. The results indicated that FEI phase initiation and following that the integration of various customers in this phase for the purpose of creating innovative ideas exerts a positive effect on the new product development success rate.