Software Tools to Enable Information Accelerated Radical Innovation

While information technology is a basic and necessary component to any research and development project leading to innovation, knowledge derived from information is crucial to accelerating radical innovation. Information has become more readily available to researchers in the past decade, with much of this information residing in digital libraries, patent databases, and even on the World Wide Web. However, much of this information is not easily retrievable. As the amount of information has grown throughout the past decade, finding specific information has become nearly impossible. Search engines are not adequate for finding critical knowledge for innovation in this vast sea of information. On the other hand, information must be rapidly retrieved and processed into knowledge in order to accelerate radical innovation. This paper describes a novel accelerated radical innovation methodology for accelerating breakthrough innovation from inception through commercialization, and then describes the required capabilities of a triad of necessary IT technologies that must be integrated with the new methodology if radical innovation is to be accelerated by the envisioned 2-10 times beyond current innovation time horizons. This IT triad includes integrated tools for information retrieval, pattern recognition, and knowledge management which must interact and cooperate.