R&D/marketing communication during the fuzzy front-end

The planning stage of an innovation project has a great effect on the commercial performance of the project. During the “fuzzy front-end”, the organization formulates a concept of the product to be developed, and determines whether or not the organization will invest resources in the concrete development of the idea. The integration of R&D and marketing activities is a necessary condition for success in innovation projects. The research question of this study is: from an information processing perspective, what role does information transfer play in integrating R&D and marketing functions during the planning stage, and what effects do project formalization and project centralization of R&D and marketing planning activities have on the efficiency of marketing and technological uncertainty reduction? The authors use an ex post facto research design to test the propositional model. The findings show that successful project teams are characterized by a maximum uncertainty reduction during planning, i.e., by a maximum decrease of R&D and marketing task variability, and a maximum increase of R&D and marketing task analyzability. Information flows between these functions help them to achieve this efficient uncertainty reduction. While project centralization has a negative effect on efficient uncertainty reduction, project formalization is curvilinearly related to the amount of uncertainty reduced during planning