European Project

Project Summary

The project goal was to develop a system to support the collection of all useful knowledge throughout the extended enterprise for new and existing process and product developments, and to develop this knowledge into a means of fostering industrial innovations. Innovation by combining the ideas and feedback from all parts of the product life cycle, including customer interaction with existing products and new product ideas, and including customer service and field engineers, including suppliers, and including pooling of knowledge between multiple sites. Innovation is a critical factor in the success of industrial companies.

The objectives of the project are:

• To develop a means of stimulating the creation of innovative ideas and collecting them from people involved with the products and processes. Specifically to increase the number of innovative suggestions, concepts and new designs by 50% in all user companies.
• To develop a way of processing these ideas and storing them into a structured knowledge repository. To ensure that all useful knowledge (innovative information) is saved.
• To develop a means of analysing innovative knowledge to determine which is useful, and which is not. That is, to enable the viability of ideas to be assessed.
• To develop the best means of delivering the innovative ideas to product and process designers for maximum effect.

Project Results

The project developed the AIM Innovation Toolkit, which addresses the problem of the management of distributed Innovation Knowledge and Ideas in complex manufacturing systems and the development of these Ideas on a project basis into a means of fostering industrial innovations.

Using AIM Innovation Toolkit allows companies to achieve the following business benefits:

• Reduce the product innovation cycle-time by at least 30%.
• Reduce the time and efforts for solving product/process problems by at least 25%.
• Improve the process efficiency by 15%.

For more details see the project presentation.