Towards systematic innovation methods: Innovation support technology that integrates business modeling, roadmapping and innovation architecture

This paper describes an enhanced version of Innovation Support Technology (IST) which we have been proposing as a Management Of Technology (MOT) framework, the IST that provides engineers a set of systematic tools for product/service innovation. The previous version of the IST mainly consists of two MOT tools: 1) a business modeling method that depicts business value and related operational plans, and 2) a strategic roadmapping method that verifies product development plans in view of resource management and social trends, and thus highlights various discrepancies among development time schedules. An implementation of the IST may contain iterative refinements between the business modeling and the strategic roadmapping so as to produce a complete plan of business and technology development. The enhanced version, which we propose here, incorporates with a formal method called ldquoinnovation architecturerdquo proposed and developed by H. Tschirky group of ETH Zurich, which has the key elements called ldquofunctions.rdquo It can enhance the above-mentioned IST implementation to be more systematic and systemic. We also report several case studies with the enhanced version of the IST from our six-year long activities (since fall 2002) in JATES¹ (Japan Techno-Economics Society).