The production, validation, and decision of their realization of new ideas for the technological innovation in businesses is based traditionally on opinions, assessments and panel sessions. Fixed bodies, however, fail short of the heterogeneity and dynamic of new ideas. In fact, a constantly changing group of highly qualified assessors, a fine-grained categorization of competences, and a validation of internal competences is needed also for external sources. Panels often have to make uncertain decisions. Actually, a dialog about ideas with sufficient time for consideration and search is strongly needed taking into account additional experts. However, usually no resources are available in due time.
At DFKI, we already achieved first results in the development of technologies for the preparation of relevant information to be used in all phases of the ideas management, i. e., from the generation of ideas to the decision of their realization. Ontology-based semantic search technology renders possible the identification of newsworthy innovations, key technologies and experts in a given application area. The structural interdependencies of the identified information are compactly visualized. In this manner, the prospects as well as the risks of innovative ideas can be recognized and evaluated in good time.
These technologies are now going to be extended and interleaved for the technology watch and monitoring: reasoning in high quality ontologies should improve information extraction, and information extraction should contribute to the semiautomatically construction and extension of ontologies.
As agreed with our application partner, ThyssenKruppSteel AG, two application domains are identified. Different versions of TechWatch tools which will be build on each other are implemented, and they will be validated for their usefulness for technology watch and monitoring by ThyssenKruppSteel AG.
