Evaluating the Impact of the Development of Innovative Products: A Multi-agent Systems Based Methodology

This article highlights the need to assess the impact of the innovation over its environment in general sense, as a factor determining its future success. This impact has to be evaluated, not only taking into account the vendor-customer relationship, but studying the entire network of actors of the innovation´s environment. First, a comprehensive analysis of the meaning of the term impact is made, its implications and the ways of measured it are exposed as well. The relevance of the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) to represent and formalize the network of actors and its dynamic (dependency and interaction) is evaluated. Then, a new impact assessment methodology based in multi-agent systems is proposed and illustrated through an example.