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The beginning of the innovation process also known as Front End of Innovation (FEI) is an important contributor to the successful development of new products and the business success. The present study aims at giving an overview of how the FEI concept has been handled over the years, by identifying the focus of the research conducted in this domain knowledge. To this end, this study unfolds an encompassing perspective by developing an analysis of existing publications against two FEI Reference Models. This analysis comprised of the compilation, selection, and review of the content of 169 publications concerning the Front End of Innovation. The period of analysis covered all years until 2015. Evidence shows that this topic has received greater attention in the recent years both regarding depth and the number of publications. However, there are still pending gaps in the literature that are highlighted in this paper. The topics addressing organisational issues were the ones that received more attention.

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Articles successfully submitted to and presented at IMC 2015: The International Management Conference

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[No abstract available]

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This paper describes results of work developed at INESC within the scope of the Esprit-5478 Shop-Control Project, as well as other related developments. The objective of the Shop-Control project1 has been to help SME's in reducing their operating expenses and enable them to deliver high quality products on schedule by providing them with an integrated shop floor control system. This system is built on an integrated set of shop floor application software packages interacting with the actual shop floor environment through factory data collection equipment and shop floor communication networks. The developed application packages include shop floor scheduling and dispatching, shop floor monitoring, supervision and alarm management, quality assurance and maintenance management. In this paper, the relevance of on-line shop floor data collection is put into focus and the underlying infrastructure is described. Information flow between interacting software applications is also presented, with a special emphasis for shop floor Supervision facilities. The integrated view on the shop floor which is achieved is of utmost importance in the support of shop floor management decision making in a wide range of end-user industries.

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