Structuring knowledge use in Inventive Design

Abstract. Computer Aided Innovation (CAI) has emerged for a few years as a scientific field offering a framework for contributions aiming at providing assistance to designers and industries in the problematic brought by innovation’s organization. In the context of R&D activities ’ management when in Inventive Design context, it is nowadays acknowledged that a significant attention needs to be given to problem formulation of a studied system associated to a specific domain. It is also commonly agreed that the use of domain knowledge and in particular their synthesis, is essential to the understanding and the elicitation of problems in a given field of industrial actors/competitors. Through this article, we are aiming at communicating on the results of a research activity led within an industrial context, where it was required to build an appropriate use of domain knowledge to ease the comprehension of key domain problems and assist decision making for R&D deciders.