Innovative support of creation by analogy-based searching of potential needs

The creation of innovative ideas is an essential part of business activities. However it is very difficult for many employees to come up with innovative ideas efficiently. This paper propose a system that supports users to create ideas by exploiting information available from online review sites based on the concept of Masakazu-Nakayama (NM) method, which is a well-known analogy based approach to creating new ideas. The key assumption is that the analogy between different product categories plays a central role in obtaining innovative ideas. Many famous inventions have actually resulted from transposing a technique or a concept used in one domain to another. The proposed system firstly calculates distances between product categories by their attributes using data obtained from review sites. The system then provides combinations of mutually similar product categories and the reasons for their similarities, so that users can utilize them as sources of new technological insights. We carried out experiments using real life data and found that the system successfully provides novel and useful analogies.