The Innovation Paradox: Concept Space Expansion with Diminishing Originality and the Promise of Creative AI

Innovation, typically spurred by reusing, recombining, and synthesizing existing concepts, is expected to result in an exponential growth of the concept space over time. However, our statistical analysis of TechNet, which is a comprehensive technology semantic network encompassing over four million concepts derived from patent texts, reveals a linear rather than exponential expansion of the overall technological concept space. Moreover, there is a notable decline in the originality of newly created concepts. These trends can be attributed to the constraints of human cognitive abilities to innovate beyond an ever-growing space of prior art, among other factors. Integrating creative artificial intelligence into the innovation process holds the potential to overcome these limitations and alter the observed trends in the future.Comment: submitted to Design Scienc

Data-Driven Network Visualization for Innovation and Competitive Intelligence

Technology positions of a firm may determine its competitive advantages and innovation opportunities. While a tangible understanding of the technology positions of a firm, i.e., the set of technologies the firm has mastered, can inform innovation and competitive intelligence, yet such positions are heterogeneous, intangible and difficult to analyze. Herein, we present a data-driven network visualization methodology to locate the knowledge positions of a firm as a subspace of the total technology space for innovation and competitive intelligence analytics. The total technology space is empirically constructed as a network map of all patent technology classes and can be overlaid with the knowledge positions of a firm according to its patent records. This paper demonstrates how to use the system to conduct historical, comparative and predictive analyses of the technology positions of individual and different firms. The methodology has been implemented into a cloud-based data-driven visual analytics system – InnoGPS

Patent Data for Engineering Design: A Critical Review and Future Directions

Patent data have long been used for engineering design research because of its large and expanding size, and widely varying massive amount of design information contained in patents. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science present unprecedented opportunities to develop data-driven design methods and tools, as well as advance design science, using the patent database. Herein, we survey and categorize the patent-for-design literature based on its contributions to design theories, methods, tools, and strategies, as well as the types of patent data and data-driven methods used in respective studies. Our review highlights promising future research directions in patent data-driven design research and practice.Comment: Accepted by JCIS

SEMANTIC NETWORKS FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN: A SURVEY

AbstractThere have been growing uses of semantic networks in the past decade, such as leveraging large-scale pre-trained graph knowledge databases for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks in engineering design research. Therefore, the paper provides a survey of the research that has employed semantic networks in the engineering design research community. The survey reveals that engineering design researchers have primarily relied on WordNet, ConceptNet, and other common-sense semantic network databases trained on non-engineering data sources to develop methods or tools for engineering design. Meanwhile, there are emerging efforts to mine large scale technical publication and patent databases to construct engineering-contextualized semantic network databases, e.g., B-Link and TechNet, to support NLP in engineering design. On this basis, we recommend future research directions for the construction and applications of engineering-related semantic networks in engineering design research and practice.</jats:p

Understanding the lifestyle of older population: Mobile crowdsensing approach

In this paper, we present a mobile crowdsensing approach to understand the daily lifestyle of the older population in Singapore. By implementing novel clustering, sensor fusion, and user profiling techniques to analyze the multisensor data (location, noise, and light) collected from a smartphone application, we identified the travel patterns at several points of interest (POI), the impact of travel frequency for certain POI, and three main user profiles. The results show that older adults mostly spend time at food courts and community centers in their home neighborhood, but they travel away from the neighborhood for healthcare and religious purposes. We found that POIs have more visits if they are easily accessible (in terms of travel time from home) regardless of the distance from home