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Can Innovation Be Automated?
JimmyQS writes "The Harvard Business Review blog has an invited piece about Innovation Software. Tony McCaffrey at the University of Massachusetts Amherst talks about several pieces of software designed to help engineers augment their innovation process and make them more creative, including one his group has developed called Analogy Finder. The software searches patent databases using natural language processing technology to find analogous solutions in other domains. According to Dr. McCaffrey 'nearly 90% of new solutions are really just adaptations from solutions that already exist — and they're often taken from fields outside the problem solver's expertise.'"
No.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
FTFY
Of course. And nothing can possibly go wrong. ibly go wrong. ibly go wrong. ibly go wrong. ibly go wrong.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
;-)
It's really well past its use by date.
Nature itself is always innovating in the most bizarre and strange ways that allow organisms to evolve adaptations to various environment. So yes, if you can create an 'evolving' algorithm sure why not. In fact most engineering challenges should be 'evolved' and computers are particularly good at that process. Produce a design create a hundreds of thousands of tweaks or mutations and breed them. The surviving solution then is what works best in that scenario.
Why are you trying to spin what people have been doing for years? A new area to data mine is not innovation, especially patents? It's an amazing tool. A fabulous idea! But let's not be patting each other on the back saying it's creative, adaptive might be a better word. As a word innovation has no place however as an adjective for this. Oh wait, it's ivy league. What could I be thinking? Would they repackage old ideas and market it as their own? Defines the word innovative!
See subject.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Of course innovation can be automated, but until brute-force automation surpasses human ingenuity (or computers learn to self-replicate and force natural selection), it'll always be more effective (but not timely) to have a human doing it.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
No.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
I'm a little tired of people of people aimlessly quoting that, without understanding the relevance. Is this a without facts article, about something contentious, or simply a question.
The article is about using software to pick *keywords" to solutions to problems that other fields have already solved. Its something *everyone* is familiar with here a whole host of "On the Internet"; "On a Mobile Phone" type crap...or interface innovation that mimics real life behaviour(Almost everything on a computer does from email to social networking), or imaginary from real life. The whole concept of the mobile phone only happening not due to magic at Sony, but due to certain technologies becoming mature.
Its not just a yes, but something we should all be aware of, its also seems fairly trivial to do. Worryingly for those with a lot of cash, an ideal way to search a related technology, and *patent* technology that is otherwise obvious, or relevant as the field has matured, or identity gaps in things not patented.
Just imagine how great it will be when Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, HP, IBM, etc get in a automated patent race where they each file millions of patents applications a month.
They'll just do to patents what they did to taxes; change the rules so that the more you file, the less you pay, and the big players make the government pick up the tab.
Why should intellectual property be any less corrupt then Wall Street? After all, big bank profits are derived from direct subsidies, so why should big tech have to pay for patents? They deserve to be on the corporate gravy train just as much as Goldman and JPMorgan.
Anything else would be unamerican. Don't you want to win the war on drugs, terrorism, the environment, free speech, privacy, ...?
Why is Snark Required?
>The software searches patent databases
Wrong turn. There ain't as such thing as innovation in patent databases. Make a U turn and search in scientific papers.
Why would you want to search existing patents, especially in software?
Patents, particularly software patents, are written to be incredibly general and almost entirely devoid of anything that's actually useful.
All you would get from searching for patents would be wilful infringement liability and treble damages when the patent holder sues you.
Maybe patents for physical processes and inventions are more useful to someone doing novel work?
Of course, innovation can be automated! It already was, considering what human brains really are.
On the other hand, this pathetic exercise of regugritation of drivel based on superficial similarity... No, it won't produce anything genuinely new.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Currently, innovation can't be automated (yet). However, stimulating innovation is definitely possible. That's why we call it "Computer Aided Innovation", similar to CAD/CAM etc. Give http://www.patentinspiration.com/ a spin!
I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention TRIZ and ASIT, which are methodologies for innovation.
TRIZ was invented by Genrich Altshuller in 1946, and has been used by russian engineers to counter the american domination on technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
The history behind TRIZ is interesting, since Genrich Altshuller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller was working as a clerk in a patent office (like Einstein), and he noticed that the patents were using some patterns.
He started to categorize all patents to enumerate the used patterns, and he found 39 characteristics with 40 generic solutions.
The idea is that you want to solve a contradiction between 2 characteristics, the contradiction is called a "conflict".
A contradiction matrix of 39*40 cells has been built: http://www.triz40.com/
Recently, the TRIZ group succeeded to verify that the matrix was able to map more than 3,000,000 patents.
TRIZ was kept as a secret before the Soviet Union exploded, then the russian engineers went to a lot of different countries.
In Israel, the TRIZ group started to simplify the methodology in a smaller set, called SIT.
Very recently, Roni Horowitz simplified SIT into ASIT, which is a set of 6 rules able to map innovation.
TRIZ explains that there are 5 levels of invention:
http://www.trizexperts.net/5levels.htm
and it's dedicated to the 4 first levels.
TRIZ is also more adapted to engineers that need a framework to solve problems, but it's not really creative in my opinion.
Of-course innovation can be automated, evolution proves it - innovation does not need a guiding hand.
The question is can we automate innovation? First of all we have to define what innovation is, then we have to admit that most of any type of innovation will not be useful at all.
Even if we can automate innovation, can we use this for any meaningful purpose? Evolution doesn't have an end goal, it only has the intermediate goal of copying data further and further into the future, and that goal is not even a conscious decision by anything or anybody, it's just the inherent property of the copying mechanism itself.
TFA talks about applying known solutions to problems where those solutions haven't been tried yet, what is the purpose and criteria, who is going to be doing this, how much energy will it require, what are the constraints?
Seems to me it's a fine idea in abstract to have a PhD theses on but it has very very little useful potential. No business will be trying to solve all problems by coding in all of the known solutions into some matrix. So a government then? Then it's a search for a subsidy to run a very expensive (and never ending) pet project.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
And it doesn't have to be brute force approach, the dumb approach would be to build an equivalent of human brain and teach it for a decade or two, I'm sure there're easier ways. However I don't think we're there yet.
90% of new solution may be, as TFA stated, re-adaption of existing solutions into other fields
But that's not "innovation" in pure sense
Innovation is something that is new
It may be a combination of two old items, like putting tea leafs in a bag made of paper, the result, however, is a brand new thing
That "90%" quote from TFA is akin to replacing "tea" with "coffee" with the outcome of "coffee bag" instead of "tea bag"
Thus, having a software that "innovates" may offer us some "re-application of technologies", but it won't give us new ideas
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Yes but this is with a computer! (on the internet?)
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
Why make such a big task out of innovation? Find a problem and solve it. Anticipate a problem and proactively solve it. It's that simple — and that difficult.
The answer to the original question is no. Because we don't have the AI technology at this point.
Why? Because of wisdom, a completely human trait that our technology cannot reproduce.
Wisdom involves knowing enough about disparate topics to develop a novel solution. That's what this "keyword" based system is trying to target.
Wisdom is something inherently human, per our evolution and our ability to think about things and react to our knowledge.
Computers, at this point, can provide specific results. This is important. If you know what to search for then the results could inspire. If you don't, then there is no benefit. The person searching has to know what to search for, that is the wisdom. The results are basically an more specific Google search.
BlameBillCosby.com
We already have analogy finder. It is called mathematics.
Excellent. Now, if someone would apply mathematics to invent a "car analogy finder for mathematics", I'd be able to get it.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Is the correct formulation here.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Having used the linked-to tool mentioned in the article, the answer is a resounding "no".
What an ass-tasktic demo.
Mod AC up. This may just be the best use of the proposed technology.
I could see this tool being used by patent examiners.
Not as long as the patent office is paid to grant patents. It would lead to too many disqualifications.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I tried to use that analogyfinder site, but I couldn't find the setting for 'cars'.
It's a decent demo of what the software does. It's just that the software doesn't do anything like what it's hyped to. It's a very limited patent searcher (you enter a verb and a noun) that also searches for synonyms of your search words. It's not automated innovation unless you're a PHB.
To me, innovation is how humans (or animals) make use of something that already exists. The new use IS the innovation. For instance, some monkey groups are using wood sticks to get ants out and eat them. Creating the wood stick (even by separating it from a tree or bush) isn't innovation : They already exist. Putting the stick into the ant nest isn't innovation : Any random event (wind, birds...) can result in having a stick into an ant nest. Putting the stick into the ant nest, waiting for the ants to walk on the stick, and eat them isn't innovation : If you create a database of things where you have stick, monkey, ant, nest and possible relationships, extracting random information from your database will inevitably result in this tuple / words being extracted "monkey uses wood stick to get ants out and eat the ants.". To me, the innovation is WHY the heck the computer / random record picker would choose / consider this possibility as more interesting, from one point of view (the monkey, the ant, the universe, whatever...) than previously. To me, THIS is innovation. There has to be a point of view. There has to be an innovator. Does the computer need to innovate for himself ? My answer is no. Can the computer propose something innovative, useful and meaningful ? Put it another way, can the computer judge the utility of an innovation for humans ? My answer is probably no. Because humans care about monkeys, ants, universe and the rest. And humans are creating culture, whereas computers are not.
what you'd really find that was useful is things that don't appear to have been patented yet. Then you just whip up an application for the particular set of buzzwords in question, file it, and voila! Patent war chest.