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Designing a remarkable product innovation is a difficult challenge, which businesses today are continuously striving to tackle. This challenge is particularly present in the fuzzy front end of innovation, where the main product concept, the DNA of the innovation, is determined. A main challenge in the fuzzy front end is the reasoning process: innovation teams are faced with open-ended, ill-defined problems, where they need to make decisions about an unknown future but have only incomplete, ambiguous and contradicting insights available. We study the reasoning of experts, how they frame to make sense of all the insights and create a basis for decision-making in relation to a new project. Based on case studies of five innovative products from various industries, we propose a Product DNA model for understanding the reasoning in the fuzzy front end of innovation. The Product DNA Model explains how experts reason and what direct their reasoning.

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In recent years, focus on the designer's ability to frame wicked problems has underlined the important positioning of the designer as a key player in the early phases of innovation. However, further clarification and development of the theory and terminology of framing are needed in order to understand and support the rather complex framing process that the design team engages in during the early phases of innovation. There is a need to understand how design teams move from an overall framing of the wicked problem, in literature termed the “ problem frame,” to creating a meaningful solution. Through in-depth case studies of the framing processes at five design companies, we learn how designers use the overall problem frame as a stepping-stone to constructing a set of “ solution frames” in order to move toward a meaningful solution that integrates different perspectives. Together with the problem frame these sets of additional solution frames constitute an overall framing of the meaningful product—a “ meaning frame.” This overall meaning frame clarifies and sets the boundaries, the values and goals, and the criteria for evaluation of a proposed solution. As such, the study sheds light on the otherwise hidden reasoning process of framing toward a meaningful solution, rather than framing the problem, which a majority of current literature discusses.

This paper focuses on the relationships between complex problems, sense-making, and exploration. We argue that we increasingly face complex problems for which we do not yet have effective coping methods. We further argue that, given the nature of these problems, it is useful to explore the role of play and games as effective coping methods. Through play we can make sense of complex phenomena and explore features thereof. Games, and in particular online games, seem to provide interesting features for capturing and dealing with complex problems. However, we argue that the games are not yet matured enough to fit the requirements for coping with specific professional settings. This leads us to propose a framework that includes games as one of four mechanisms. The framework is tested in a professional case.