What’s the difference?
I got a couple of questions about what both acronyms mean. It’s simple: FEI is the Front End of Innovation, BEI stands for the Back End of Innovation. They represent the two big blocks of the innovation journey: the early stages and the late stages.
There are many different definitions of each block and the blocks often overlap. Typically, they include the following stages:
- FEI: the more unstructured stages, like ideation and experimentation;
- BEI: the more structured stages, like pilots and commercialization.
The specific definition of each is not that important. The main value of defining these 2 categories is that innovation broadly requires 2 kinds of mindsets, skills, tools and metrics.
- FEI: is about curiosity, discovery, making connections, go where no one has gone before, trying out new things, being open to failure. It is therefore non-linear and often perceived as “fuzzy”. Some tools that are used in this stage are aimed at developing the right story: the problem to be solved, an innovative solution or/and a potential business/customer value that will be created. Other tools can help generating innovative ideas, like brainstorm techniques and hackathons. Then there are tools that assist with experimenting simple and fast, like MVPs and prototypes. Metrics include the number of appropriate ideas generated, the number of failed projects and the number of projects across the innovation pipeline.
- BEI: is about planning, execution, optimizing, organizing, scaling, in other words things large corporations are already very good at. Corporations have tools, structures and skills in place to execute on this. Metrics can include ROI, the number of countries that adopted the innovation and profits.
There are even annual conferences dedicated to each FEI and BEI. This year, they of course went digital.
With COVID-19, we currently experience an acceleration of the BEI. Telehealth, e-commerce, remote learning are all innovations that were already used by the “early adopters”, but they are now quickly scaled to a large majority of customers. It will be interesting to see which COVID-induced FEI initiatives will emerge in the coming months and years.
I mostly enjoyed working on the FEI, as this is the more unstructured stage where a lot of value can be added by an Innovation Leader in an established, large corporation. In this stage, innovators can be helped to formulate their innovation story and to learn fast/fail fast. It is also important to connect them with collaborators from across the organization. Of course, for successful innovation one doesn’t go without the other.
As Sarah Ban Breathnach said:
“The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all what the world needs most are dreamers that do.“
So, as Innovation Leader, I used a very simple innovation framework with 4 stages: Ideation, Experimentation, Pilot, Scaling. The first 2 were the FEI, the other 2 the BEI.
More about this topic: PROVIDING CLARITY AND A COMMON LANGUAGE TO THE “FUZZY FRONT END“, by Peter Koen, et al.
Please share your thoughts about the above?
Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele