Mining innovative ideas to support new product research and development

Here, we present an approach for automatically identifying the innovative potential of new technological ideas extracted from textual information. The starting point of each innovation is a good and new idea. Unfortunately, a high percentage of innovations fail, which means many ideas do not have the potential to become an innovation in future. The innovation process from a new idea as starting point via research, development, and production activities through to an innovative product is very cost- and time-consuming. Therefore, the aim of our work is to identify the innovative potential of new technological ideas to improve the performance of the innovation process. We extract new technological ideas from provided textual information. We also identify innovative technology fields by analysing relationships among technologies. All identified ideas are assigned to innovative technology fields by using text mining and text classification methods. Technological ideas in these fields are presented to the user as innovative ideas and might be used as starting point for new product research and development divisions