From Preliminary Ideas to Corroborated Product Definitions: Managing the Front End of New Product Development
研究了新产品开发前端的三项核心活动（想法/概念开发、对齐和合法化），这些活动帮助企业形成确证的产品定义，并探讨了渐进式与激进式前端开发以及开放式创新的影响。
Front-end activities largely influence the outcomes of new product development processes, because it is here that firms create new ideas, give them direction, and set them in motion. We show that the front end can be understood as comprising three core activities: idea/concept development, idea/concept alignment, and idea/concept legitimization, which allow firms to create corroborated product definitions. This article provides important implications for managers interested in front-end management. It devotes specific attention to the differences between incremental and radical front-end development and to the front end in the light of increasingly open innovation processes.