How food companies manage their innovation process: A multinational food company point of view

This current research, as a natural consequence of previous findings, focuses on the first phase of the New Food Development (NFD) process. Being this phase the most creative and innovative, it comes naturally to think it is also the most chaotic, very difficult to standardize and to control. At the same time, this phase is considered one of the most important of the overall process, because it adds the most value to the product that is going to be created. Starting from these considerations, the aim of this paper is to enrich the previous study by understanding how food companies could enhance their competitiveness by leveraging on their front-end process, with a special focus on the use of structured approaches for creativity and innovation and on the PLM solution. An important multinational food company has been used as a case study to investigate the above research objectives and to provide a preliminary conceptual framework to model the impact of structured front-end process on the overall NFD success. This study allowed to identify how the FFE food process is structured, the main CSFs and KPIs, as well as which methods and IT tools are used to support the analyzed process. Concerning the latest, a deeper analysis has been done focusing on the PLM solution, understanding how its functionalities are used to support the different FFE process sub-activities. Finally, this work confirms the results identified in the previous study, affirming the lack of adoption that the PLM solution plays in the FFE phase.