Convenor
Convenor's affiliation
Stuart Grant
Cranfield University
Co-convenors
N/A
Abstract
The Front End of Innovation (FEI) represents the most creative yet uncertain phase of R&D - where opportunities are identified, concepts are framed, and customer needs are translated into product directions. In the medical-technology domain, this stage is further shaped by regulatory, clinical, and ethical constraints that demand resilience alongside creativity. This track explores how med-tech teams make sense of emerging opportunities, transform insights into viable concepts, and navigate ambiguity in multidisciplinary environments. We invite contributions examining managerial, psychological, and systemic aspects of the FEI - from sensemaking and customer insight generation to prototyping, design transfer, and early regulatory planning. The track aims to connect academic research with practitioner experience, offering new perspectives on how creativity and resilience coexist in the highly regulated, high-stakes world of medical technology innovation.
Description
The Front End of Innovation (FEI) is often described as the “fuzzy front end” of the R&D process - where ambiguity, learning, and creativity dominate before structured development begins. In medical technology, this phase is particularly complex: innovation teams must reconcile divergent inputs from clinicians, engineers, designers, and regulatory specialists while forming shared understanding and early concepts under significant technical and ethical uncertainty.
This track invites theoretical, empirical, and practice-based contributions that explore how creativity and resilience manifest in the FEI of medical-technology innovation. We welcome papers, cases, and conceptual works addressing questions such as:
• How do innovation teams make sense of unmet clinical needs and transform them into actionable opportunities?
• What processes, tools, or cultural conditions enable creativity under regulatory and technical constraint?
• How does resilience - individual, team, and organisational - emerge during early-stage uncertainty?
• In what ways do front-end practices differ across corporate R&D, start-ups, and academic-industry collaborations?
• What role do artefacts, prototypes, and early testing play in aligning cross-functional perspectives?
Building on contemporary FEI research (e.g., Koen et al., 2001; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012) and the growing body of med-tech innovation studies, this track aims to create an interdisciplinary forum linking management, design, engineering, and healthcare innovation. We particularly encourage submissions that combine qualitative depth with practical insight - multi-case studies, ethnographies of innovation teams, or analyses of organisational learning and decision-making under constraint.
The track also seeks to connect academia and industry by engaging med-tech innovators, clinicians, design engineers, and policy makers. Interactive sessions, panel discussions, and mini-workshops will be encouraged to foster dialogue around key challenges: integrating regulatory foresight into early design, balancing creativity with patient safety, and building innovation systems that are resilient to disruption.
By situating the FEI within the med-tech context, the track contributes to broader R&D-management debates on creativity, resilience, and knowledge integration. It aims to highlight how structured creativity can emerge in regulated environments - and how resilience is not simply about persistence, but about adaptive sensemaking across diverse expertise domains.