The front end is a phase of the innovation process that starts with a new product idea and completes when firms have developed a new product definition. This phase is critical for many manufacturing firms. Front-end outcomes is indeed critical to overall product success, market penetration, time to-market, and financial performance. During this phase, new products are born as ideas, and subsequently move through screening, project definition, and business analysis. However, this phase remains poorly understood in the era of more open innovation (e.g., interfirm collaboration). Although the literature on front end of innovation is well developed, prior studies have largely focused on bilateral agreements and have overlooked conditions for collaboration with science-based partners (universities and research institutes). This is especially true for manufacturing firms, for which a continuous stream of new product ideas is a key source of competitiveness. To make things worse, the front end of innovation conducted with external actors involved is often characterized by incongruent practices by partners, different magnitudes of fuzziness, and considerable risks in revealing new ideas. Developing new product definitions with different partners is thus a risky endeavor if mishandled that may seriously compromise competitive advantages of firms. Therefore, greater knowledge is required to facilitate the collaborative front end with different types of partners. Against this background, the purpose of this dissertation is to understand how to manage the collaborative front end in manufacturing firms, with a particular focus on requirements, capabilities, and conditions.

To fulfill this research purpose, data on manufacturing firms were collected through four case studies and one survey. In total, this dissertation is based on empirical data from 81 interviews with R&D members across 10 medium-sized and large manufacturing firms, as well as a survey of 146 small and medium-sized manufacturing firms. Respondents were based in Brazil or Sweden. The key theories and literature covered include coordination modes, control mechanisms, organizational routines, the resource-based view, and appropriability mechanisms.

This dissertation makes several contributions. First, it extends the front-end literature by presenting the concepts of systematic idea generation and fuzziness assessment as a prerequisite for improving front-end performance. Second, this dissertation lists collaboration conditions that help firms cooperate better with science-based partners. By collaborating with science-based partners, firms  can access codified and tacit scientific knowledge, enabling them to rapidly build on the latest research insights. The findings suggest particular practices that can be applied to reduce cultural differences and diminish goal divergence among project members. Third, this dissertation describes a set of detailed practices to streamline the involvement of different types of partners using diverse appropriability mechanisms. Ultimately, a theoretical framework is developed to describe how to manage the collaborative front end of innovation. The theoretical framework explains how manufacturing firms can use their organizational capabilities to efficiently and safely develop new product ideas. In particular, the framework identifies the necessary capabilities to explore mechanisms, practices, and routines in terms of divergent thinking, external expertise, and multiple opinions. Altogether, these contributions will assist firms to better manage collaborative front end.