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.'"

Comments

Following Betteridge's law of headlines

[grouchomarxist]

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Can we stop this tired cliche?

[six025]

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

;-)

It's really well past its use by date.

Re:Can we stop this tired cliche?

[TeknoHog]

But correlation is not causation! Also, hot grits.

"One Click"

[Required Snark]

Yep, just as creative as Bezos's "One Click" patent. Perfect technology for a legal regime dominated by lawyers with patent examiners recruited from regions that have only horses, and people go to town to use the only telephone.

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, ...?

Re:Except the Answer is unfortunately Yes

[gl4ss]

the headline isn't "can research be made more efficient by using machine searches?".

TRIZ

[eulernet]

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.

90% of new solutions ...

[Taco Cowboy]

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

Re:90% of new solutions ...

[Stirling Newberry]

An idea is joining two things which seem different, but can be shown to actually be the same. By providing possible reapplication, that is part of the way to "something new," depending on how far afield. If you look at many "new" ideas, the parts and their origins become obvious. The "new" part will often be the means of moving the solution to its new context.

Take, for example the derivation of the Lorentz contraction from a description of the movement of light in aether. Lorentz simplified the mathematics by inventing the idea of local time, to move equations meant for kinematics to this new context of Maxwellian radiation. Poincare recognized that "local time" was an ingenious idea, but did not quite get to what we think of as relativity. The Lorentz contraction, and "local time" are then moved, essentially wholesale, into Einstein's kinematics.

New isn't always the elephant, it is the ability to visualize the elephant where it has never been before. Since innovation is not a completely black box problem, aiding visualization of it can be valuable.

Analogy Finder?

[ilsaloving]

I tried to use that analogyfinder site, but I couldn't find the setting for 'cars'.