Introduction

Each year, innovation providers (e.g., developers of new components or manufacturing technologies) announce thousands of technological innovations (e.g., descriptions of new or improved manufacturing processes, materials, and components). An innovation consumer (an organization that may wish to make use of a technological innovation) can modify a product or its manufacturing processes to incorporate technological innovations, then this might give substantial benefits to the organization, such as improvements in the functionality and performance of the product, or reductions in its manufacturing cost and time-to-market of those products.

However, to make such modifications will also incur substantial costs. To decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs sufficiently to warrant making modifications, an innovation consumer may need to obtain and analyze information about many different innovations. In current practice, there are several significant problems with obtaining and analyzing that information. For example, these difficulties include innovation consumers receive too many innovation announcements to evaluate them adequately, current design methodologies make it difficult to assimilate innovations, and existing general search facilities are not adequate.

In this research, we will develop an innovation-alert services for managing product evolution.

Overview of Approach

We plan to build a prototype of innovation-alert services to support next-generation product design. This innovation-alert service will facilitate the information exchange between innovation consumers and providers. We will develop "information-gathering scout" for searching the design repository to find information relevant to a given design decision. An architecture of the innovation-alert services is shown as follows.

The implementation of the innovation-alert services is shown as follows.