Computer aided innovation

Abstract

Innovation plays a crucial role in the development and the sustainability of the economy. Regardless its importance and the numerous national and international programs to promote and support innovation, it still remains an ad-hoc process based on hand-shaking and brainstorming. It is expected that Computer Aided Innovation (CAI) will have an impact similar to the one that Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering had to Manufacturing. In thesis we investigate the notion of CAI and try to collect the essential elements that might lead to a systematic approach for innovation. Specifically we first review the available theories and frameworks that have the potential to provide the necessary background for future CAI systems. Specifically we consider TRIZ, ARIZ, QFD, SIX SIGMA and few others which they surely have a common objective but so far they seem to be unrelated from most other aspects. We compare them and try to identify their conceptual similarities and their common components at the semantic level. Furthermore, we have systematically collected the available software systems for Innovation and interrelated them to our theoretical review. We conclude by proposing a semantic based software platform for CAI and investigate the critical issues concerning its implementation