A categorization of innovation funnels of companies as a way to better make conscious agility and permeability of innovation processes

Abstract : It is common in the Management Science and Design Engineering communities to represent the processes contributing to innovation in companies as a funnel or similar variants. It is assumed it is possible to represent an analogy to the stages of planning and idea generation (the so-called fuzzy front-end), conception generation, as well as idea and concept selection to end up with the very few emerging developed and launched products and services on the market. First, this analogy may feature different innovation process layers, each of them independently as well as the entire set of these innovation process layers. After a review of literature on this funnel representation, we show that this analogy may be meaningful to globally represent and discuss about some properties of the innovation capability of a company at different locations: the R&D process as well as a given NPD process. We further describe a survey carried out within 28 large European technological companies through 48 detailed face-to-face interviews. Our questionnaire has allowed us to observe some characteristic patterns in the innovation funnels. We finally propose a model of five innovation funnels varying by their shape, permeability of emerging ideas and agility in terms of innovation management. We also hypothesize that these 5 funnels evolve in a sequential and cyclic way and that our cyclic model may be used as a questioning tool for the continuous improvement of the innovation management.