Computer-aided innovation for improving industrial innovation intelligence

Computer-aided innovation is an emerging domain using information and communication technologies to improve efficiency and effectiveness of innovation process, any system of organized activities that transforms a technology from an idea to a commercial product. Low success rates of this risky/expensive endeavor and technological and managerial barriers in new product development (NPD) induced by increasing product complexities, dynamism on customer requirements and internationalization and/or decentralization of NPD make computer-aided innovation tools and methods crucial and unavoidable. This thesis presents two novel computer-aided innovation methods aiming to improve industrial innovation intelligence and hence to improve success rates in innovation process. The former is named as "Quick Innovation Intelligence Process" and it is a novel technology assessment process trying to assess innovation potential of candidate technologies by considering their commercial potential, imitation potential and their trendiness all together. This process uses corresponding patent data, publication data and some market research reports in order to infer about innovation potential of candidate technologies. Type-2 fuzzy sets and a data-fusion approach are used to combine results of these different aspects. The latter is named as "NegoQFD" and it is a multi-issue negotiation based quality function deployment (QFD) method. It uses a novel, clear, rational and an easy-to-use mechanism for multi-issue negotiation, named as "Modified Even-Swaps" that is also developed in the scope of this thesis. It aims to provide a mode for customer co-creation in NPD while concept generation and evaluation.