Boosting creativity in co-creation with consumers in the fuzzy front-end of new product development: A literature review and organising framework

Abstract

Interest in consumer co-creation in the fuzzy front-end of the new product development (NPD) process has increased in recent years. It is generally acknowledged that integrating consumers into collaborative idea generation leverages the potential of social interactions, knowledge sharing and collective creativity, and it may improve the success of NPD. Despite extensive literature on value co-creation, little is known about how creativity can be enhanced and encouraged in this process. Based on a thorough literature review, the author develops an organising framework and six propositions on how creativity can be stimulated at the fuzzy front-end of the innovation process. By exploring the relevant literature, this study extends the understanding of the role that creativity plays in co-creation for NPD and provides some guidelines that may help boost the creative output and interest in co-creation activities during the development stage of an idea.

Incremental Innovation versus Discontinuous Innovation: An Analysis of the Fuzzy Front End

“…Consequently, creativity and innovation are part of the same process (Amabile & Pratt, 2016). Thus, different authors place importance on creativity in FFE (Huang et al, 2020;Olszewski, 2022;Ummar & Saleem, 2020), focusing their attention on various aspects, such as understanding the creative process within an organization (Amabile, 1988(Amabile, , 1996(Amabile, , 2012; Amabile & Pratt, N 2016), reviewing and comparing creative techniques (Haeser et al, 2015;Seclen-Luna & López-Valladares, 2020), determining how techniques are used in the generation of product concepts (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al, 2017;Silva et al, 2020), and problem definition in the creative process (Vizioli & Kaminski, 2017), among others.…”