Web-Based Innovation Alert Services to Support Product Design Evolution

Abstract

Technological innovations provide an opportunity to improve product performance and reduce cost. Therefore, design organizations are interested in monitoring technological innovations. A large number of innovations are announced every year. Monitoring them manually is very time consuming. We are developing web-based innovation-alert services that can be used to monitor and communicate information about innovations relevant to a particular product design. In this paper, we discuss the required infrastructure, relevant design issues, and our approach to developing web-based innovation alert services to support product design evolution. We also describe a prototype innovation monitoring service for computer components and an interactive tool to transform semi-structured web contents into semantic representations in XML.