Dec 3

Written by: Jack Ring
12/3/2007 

The current era of CAD may be augmented upstream with computer-aided invention or creativity and will be augmented downstream with computer-aided innovation. The need exists, the money is there, the technology is here. Only one ingredient missing.

I like David G. Ullman’s definition of design, “Elaboration of information punctuated by decision.” The current era of CAD helps designers once their decisions are made and it is time to record the results.

Current CAD also helps evaluate decision options, also called tradeoffs. The forthcoming era of computer-aided creativity or computer-aided invention will help designers much earlier in a project. The Three P’s are one way to think about this: possibilities, probabilities, and pursuits. Possibilities are the kinds of ideas produced by brainstorming, nominal group technique, idea writing and similar methods. Probabilities are the possibilities that survive analysis and assessment. Pursuits are the elaborations of the one to three more promising design options, then convergence on decision.

Ben Shneiderman, U. of Maryland, doesn’t use these same words, but his article, "Creativity Support Tools," in the December 2007 issue of the Communications of the ACM, page 20, is right on the mark. He identifies four principles for forthcoming creativity support tools: a) support exploratory search, b) enable collaboration, c) provide rich history keeping and d) design with low thresholds, high ceilings and wide walls. I recommend his article which, of course, is broader and deeper than this short note.

Similarly, the forthcoming era of computer-aided innovation will help designers later in a project. According to Tom Koulopoulos, Delphi Group, invention is an event while innovation is a process. Paraphrasing a VP of 3M company, invention applies money to generate ideas while innovation applies ideas to generate money.

Every new product deserves a new enterprise to maximize the return on invention. Innovation uses possibilities, probabilities and pursuits to creates the ‘new enterprise’ except that the focus is on designing the new enterprise, not the new product. Perhaps the new enterprise, once designed, is constructed by adapting the existing enterprise.

Alternatively, the new enterprise might be constructed as a greenfield project, shedding all the baggage, also called overhead, that has built up in the existing enterprise. Frequently this is a more complicated set of issues than was the design of the product. A new kind of computer-aided emulation of intelligent enterprises can be expected to appear.