Abstract: This paper introduces a new IMS project
with the goal of developing a system to support the collection
of innovative ideas and relevant knowledge throughout the extended
enterprise for new and existing process and product developments,
and to develop these ideas and knowledge into a means of fostering
industrial innovations. The main objective of the Project AIM
(Acceleration of Innovative Ideas into the Market) is to develop
a means of stimulating the creation of innovative ideas in general,
and specifically on problem solving and on potential product/process
improvements, and collecting them from people involved with the
products and processes. This paper will present an overview of
the methodology and functionality of the AIM system illustrated
with some of the business cases that the project is dealing with
(both large multinational enterprises and SMEs).
1. Introduction
Innovation is a critical factor
in the success of industrial companies. Innovation is important
for all companies, and just as important is the need to get innovative
products to the marketplace quickly. To achieve this it is essential
to concentrate on good, innovative products, and at the same
time to focus on process innovations (flexible, agile production)
to bring these novel products quickly to market.
People inside and outside the
physical boundaries of the industrial organisation are an untapped
resource for innovative ideas and knowledge. If the collective
talents and knowledge of the people involved with the products
and processes of industrial organisation (including the customers
and the suppliers) could be collected, processed and developed
into a repository of innovation ideas and knowledge, then the
potential benefits in terms of innovation could be enormous.
The challenge industrial companies
have to face is first how to set up a system supporting the collection
of innovative ideas and relevant knowledge throughout the extended
enterprise for new and existing process and product developments.
Second: how to develop these ideas and knowledge into a means
of fostering industrial innovations. Innovation is to be achieved
by combining the ideas and feedback from all parts of the product
life cycle, including customer interaction with existing products
and new product/process ideas, and including customer service
and field engineers, including suppliers, and including pooling
of knowledge between multiple sites. Such a system will enable
organisational learning by providing a means to collect, store
and use/develop innovative ideas over the extended enterprise.
The basic assumption is that
innovative ideas and product/process knowledge can be collected
either (a) by requiring innovative solutions of identified product/processes
problems and improvement potentials, or, (b) by directly and
continuously collecting ideas from all involved actors in an
extended enterprise (independently of the identified problems).
Therefore, the concept is to provide an effective collection
of innovative ideas, product/process knowledge and information/knowledge
on products/processes problems/improvement potentials, to combine/integrate,
process and evaluate these ideas and knowledge and deliver them
to product/process designers.
2. Extended Enterprise
Extended enterprise concept
aims to add value to the product by incorporating to it knowledge
and expertise coming from all participants on the product value
chain. Manufacturers need to benefit from Extended Enterprise
techniques by involving all actors throughout product life cycle:
suppliers, customers, design, production, servicing…. They
will provide their own product knowledge to enhance product development
and support. This knowledge needs to be saved and managed. Loss
of this knowledge results in increased costs, longer time-to-market,
reduced quality of products and services. This new paradigm implies
a quite new scenario: knowledge capturing and sharing, new forms
of interrelationship between companies and persons, etc.
The novelty of the approach
is to focus on product knowledge, which is not managed today,
and which comes from suppliers, customers and employees (and
tacit or informal knowledge generated by internal staff) involved
in the development and support and use of products. It represents
the next evolution of product information systems, taking standards
and practices forward to support co-operative working and partnerships.
The key idea behind the projects
presented here is to develop means supporting the collection
of all useful knowledge throughout the extended enterprise for
new and existing process and product developments. This knowledge
will then be developed into a means of fostering industrial innovations.
Innovation by combining the ideas and feedback from all parts
of the product life cycle, including customer interaction with
existing products and customer's new product ideas; service and
field engineers; suppliers and knowledge pooling among multiple
sites. Innovation is a critical factor in the success of industrial
companies.
3. AIM
The Project AIM: Acceleration
of Innovative ideas to Market (IST-2001-52222) started in June
2002. It runs under the IMS programme with partners from Europe,
Australia and USA by the moment, since the consortium is running
negotiations with partners from Japan and Switzerland which have
showed interest for joining the group.
The project goal is to develop
a system to support the collection of all useful knowledge throughout
the extended enterprise for new and existing process and product
developments, and to develop this knowledge into a means of fostering
industrial innovations. Innovation by combining the ideas and
feedback from all parts of the product life cycle, including
customer interaction with existing products and new product ideas,
and including customer service and field engineers, including
suppliers, and including pooling of knowledge between multiple
sites. Innovation is a critical factor in the success of industrial
companies.
The objectives of the project
are:
- To develop a means of stimulating
the creation of innovative ideas and collecting them from people
involved with the products and processes. Specifically to increase
the number of innovative suggestions, concepts and new designs
by 50% in all user companies.
- To develop a way of processing
these ideas and storing them into a structured knowledge repository.
To ensure that all useful knowledge (innovative information)
is saved.
- To develop a means of analysing
innovative knowledge to determine which is useful, and which
is not. That is, to enable the viability of ideas to be assessed.
- To develop the best means
of delivering the innovative ideas to product and process designers
for maximum effect.
This should lead to the following
business benefits:
- Reduction of product innovation
cycle-time by at least 30% (specifically for SME business case
no. 1, and business case 3 for engineering services, and business
case 5 electronic industry)
- Reduction of time and efforts
for solving product/process problems by at least 25 % (all business
cases)
- Improvement of process efficiency
by 15 % and reduction of wastes by 12 % (specifically within
manufacturing process in business cases no. 2 and 4).
The key idea behind the project
is to develop means supporting the collection of all useful knowledge
throughout the extended enterprise for new and existing process
and product developments. This knowledge will then be developed
into a means of fostering industrial innovations.
The project fits into the objectives
of both IST (II.1.2 Knowledge Management) and Sustainable Growth
(Targeted Research Action 1.7 "Extended Enterprise")
programmes and directly addresses the IMS technical themes: Corporate
technical memory and "Virtual / extended enterprise issues".
4. Innovation
The project is novel as it
seeks to encourage innovation creation in all people who are
involved with the product lifecycle, and the production processes.
It also encourages team working between people from different
sites (and working off-site), and between organisations, customers
and suppliers.
The accelerated pace of technological
development continuously increases time and market pressures
on manufacturers' capacity to innovate new products and designs
and to develop the manufacturing processes that produce these
products. The relentless race to develop new, higher quality
products, simultaneously reducing time to market, reduce product
cost, improve quality is a major challenge for all companies.
Many companies lack the financial capacity either to invest in
the latest technology as it reaches the market or to hire specialists
to integrate new methodologies and systematically to improve
their products.
Many companies have the required
corporate breadth-of-experience to improve their products, improve
their processes if they could only make best use of their knowledge
resources internally and in partnership with their suppliers
and customers. Stimulation of 'Innovation' is a means by which
these knowledge resources could be channelled.
Major difficulties for innovation
are related with two main topics (which will be addressed by
this project):
(a) Intangibility of the inventive
knowledge. The inventive capacity is usually considered more
as an inherent property of the genius than something that may
be learnt. Intangibility makes the inventive knowledge difficult
to accumulate and transfer. Emerging theories say that the capacity
for innovation observed in some inventors is not more than an
instinctively applied methodology for abstraction, which gives
sense to the words "inventive knowledge" (or "innovative
knowledge"), defined here as "the knowledge necessary
for finding solutions at any abstraction level". Therefore
intangibility will be overcome by establishing rules, methodologies
and tools for abstraction and concretion of problems, allowing
to accumulate them and their solutions in a hierarchical database
with the abstraction level as hierarchy separator.
(b) Individualisation of the
innovation process. Investigations performed during the last
20 years have demonstrated that innovation is better achieved
by working in team. In the first conceptualisation steps the
working teams should include the best experts in several fields
available world-wide which is completely impractical for many
manufacturing companies. Due to this problem, innovation thinking
is usually tried by individuals on their own, which becomes almost
impossible in the current stressed and time limited working environments.
Such problems could be minimised
by employing innovation methodologies during the development
process and incorporating tools to support innovation along the
process. However, even when enterprises try to incorporate new
methodologies, many problems appear due to human- and methodology-specific
factors. Human factors include problems of encouraging and convincing
people to use new and innovative methodologies. It is noted that
new methodologies, however enthusiastically received, are frequently
discarded in favour of familiar methods shortly after they are
taught and personnel trained. Implementation of new methodologies
is also frequently inefficient in time-management terms due to
complexity, dependence on worker experience and interpretation,
as well as processing of results. Methodology factors: available
engineering methodologies are frequently theory-overloaded and
do not integrate well with one another, if at all. In the chain
of methodologies there is lack of transparency in planning, cost,
technological and quality data's.
5. Approach
5.1 AIM system
The AIM system will include
methods and tools (modules) for collecting innovative ideas and
knowledge on products/processes. The system will also contemplate
another important source of innovative knowledge coming from
problems and potential improvement points. The system will also
support assessment on these innovative ideas and help to manage
them in order to provide the best way of using them for innovative
product and process designs.
In summary, the AIM system will support the collection of innovative
ideas and relevant knowledge throughout the extended enterprise
for new and existing process and product developments. These
ideas and knowledge will later be developed into a means of fostering
industrial innovations. It will enable organisational learning
by providing means to collect, store and use/develop innovative
ideas over the extended enterprise.
5.2 Functional approach
The main functional elements
of the AIM system are:
- Innovation Repository: This
repository will classify ideas using an 'innovation' meta classification,
and will store them for rapid access. The overall meta classification
of the (innovative) ideas and innovations will be defined as
a basis for all AIM modules. The problem is how to enable appropriate
classification for different specific products and processes,
as well as within a specific company concept. This will include:
Product/process knowledge base, Problems/Improvements potential
repository, (Innovative) ideas and Innovations.
- Product/process knowledge
base: This knowledge base will include all relevant information
and models as well as experience-based knowledge of products
and processes related to the information systems available in
the enterprise.
- Problems/Improvements potential
repository: This repository will include knowledge on problems
and potential improvements regarding products/processes. This
will cover knowledge on problems identified, their reasons and/or
ways which were used to solve them in the past.
- Collection of innovative ideas
and product/process knowledge: This module will be based on combination
of 'classical' approaches/commercial tools together with new
developments required to provide means to efficiently collect
innovative ideas, but also to collect knowledge on product and
process problems for which the innovative ideas are needed. This
module will include an appropriate user interface to introduce
ideas and knowledge on products/process and about the identified
problems.
- Innovation Engine: This is
a collection of methods oriented to finding innovative solutions
following a systematic methodology. This is the facility that
provides a structured means for the development of ideas into
innovation concepts. The ideas collected within previous module
and stored in the repository will be further developed. This
will involve taking the most appropriate parts from state of
the art methods for innovation development approaches as well,
and developing these into a specification for the development
of an innovation engine, which can be used to develop thoughts
and ideas into innovative solutions. This will be the means by
which raw, creative ideas can be organised and developed by sharing
and working on these ideas in a structured framework. The specific
requirement is to provide robust solutions to be applied in the
industrial environment. TRIZ methodology is likely to serve as
a baseline approach for this module.
- Innovation Viability Assessment:
This facility will provide a structure (based on decision-tree
criteria) to assist users in assessing the feasibility of new
innovative ideas. Innovations which cannot be turned into reality,
for commercial or socio-economic benefit are of little use. It
is important to focus on feasible, good innovative knowledge,
and develop this. This facility will involve taking the state
of the art innovation assessment methods and specifying a solution
to provide viability assessments of ideas at the collection stage,
and innovation assessment facilities for design teams.
- Innovation Management System:
This will be a means of providing structured delivery of the
innovations/ideas to the process and product Design Teams. This
module will assist graphically the work of the Design Teams in
designing new process and products in the companies. It will
also provide an efficient way for planning and monitoring the
use of the innovation knowledge during the design activities.
The architecture will be finally
deployed following a multi-level architecture based on Internet
technologies. Integration with other tools inside each enterprise
will carefully be studied and adapted to specific needs.
6. Business Cases
The project will be based on
several business cases, one from each user. These will be used
to ensure that the project is driven by industrial needs, and
that these needs are met (by validations and assessments of the
results at strategic phases of the project). These business cases
will be focused on innovations for product development and innovations
for process developments. The business cases will therefore use
the AIM system in different ways, e.g. while some business cases
will be oriented to directly collect innovative ideas and knowledge,
in some the motivation for collection of ideas will be realised
via identification of problems/improvement potentials asking
for innovative ideas. This will enable to develop and test AIM
system for different scenarios, ensuring its general applicability.
6.1 Business Case 1: Product
innovations in SMEs
This business case concerns
rapid product innovation in an SME, developing new innovative
products internally by getting everyone involved, including field
engineers working with customers to generate product ideas. This
business case will focus on providing a structured and rapid
approach to product innovation, so that the time to market is
reduced. This is extremely important for most companies, particularly
SMEs which have to produce innovative products for the marketplace,
and where it is essential to have a minimal time to market.
6.2 Business Case 2: Multiple
site process innovations in high volume manufacturing
This business case will focus
upon innovation in multiple site manufacturing process based
on the identified problems and improvement potentials. The end-user
is a large multiple site company producing high volume products.
Currently, many innovative ideas from employees are not used
since there is no system to collect such ideas, assess them and
deliver them to process designers. In order to collect information
on problems in production, for which innovative ideas are needed,
the integration and expansion of the IT-Systems implemented in
production will be applied. The extension of the systems should
mainly be concentrated on knowledge-based methods for the improvement
of the production & quality data analysis, providing faster
problem causes identification. The special challenge of this
business case is that it will address manufacturing process distributed
over multiple sites. The industrial partner has several plants
in Germany and Europe, but also in US and other regions. Several
sites will be involved in this business case. The goal is to
collect problems/improvement potentials and innovative ideas
from these multiple site manufacturing plants, i.e. to provide
means to put together ideas from actors in different plants.
The teamwork on developing the ideas across the multiple site
will be supported by AIM system as well.
6.3 Business Case 3:Product
and process innovations in engineering services and customer
and supplier focus
A medium size company, being
part of a larger industrial group is a system provider to industry
and is strongly oriented towards sales, service, marketing and
after-market.. The company is working closely with their suppliers/partners.
Therefore, a system for collecting of innovative ideas from both
employees and suppliers is an urgent need. The business case
scenario will involve collection ideas internally and at supplier
sites. Specifically the benefits from collecting ideas at supplier
site could be high, taking into account a high interest of suppliers
to provide ideas to improve services with their products.
7. Conclusions
The overall objective of the
AIM project is twofold: Increasing Innovation and accelerating
their introduction to the Market. We expect that the project
will be a good help to push manufacturing companies moving towards
increasing innovation rates throughout the new paradigms of Extended
Enterprise and Knowledge Management.
The project is still in its
preliminary stages and the main RTD challenges to be faced along
it are already known and assessed. Basically they will be the
combination of methods for generating innovative ideas (i.e.:
TRIZ) with "classical" methods for collection of knowledge
on products/processes and their problems, and the development
of specific ontologies needed to enable efficient exchange of
ideas between different experts/actors within the extended enterprise.
Specific achievements expected
out of the full implementation of the AIM system may be listed
as:
Developing means of stimulating
the creation of innovative ideas and collecting them from people
involved with the products and processes.
Developing ways of processing
these ideas and storing them into a structured knowledge repository.
To ensure that all useful knowledge (innovative information)
is saved.
Developing means of analysing
innovative knowledge to determine which is useful, and which
is not. That is, to enable the viability of ideas to be assessed.
Developing means of delivering
the innovative ideas to product and process designers for maximum
effect.
This should lead to the following
business benefits:
- Reduction of product innovation
cycle-time by at least 30%
- Reduction of time and efforts
for solving product/process problems by at least 25 %
- Improvement of process efficiency
by 15 % and reduction of wastes by 12 %
Acknowledgement
Authors express their acknowledgement
to the other members of the project consortium and to the European
Commission supporting the project.
References
[1] AIM -- IST-2001-52222:
Acceleration of Innovative ideas to Market. From 1/06/2002 to
31/05/2005.
[2] Blake, A., Mann, D., Making Knowledge Tangible, CMC and DuVersity,
September 2000.
[3] Kohnhauser, V., Use of TRIZ in the Development Process, Triz
Journal, June 1999.
[4] Sawaguchi, M., Study of Effective New Product Development
Activities trough Combination of Patterns of Evolution of Technological
Systems and VE, March 2001. |