Knowledge market innovations for business advantage The knowledge collection and management toolkit designed within the AIM project aims to contribute to the competitiveness of industrial companies by providing them with means to foster their innovation capabilities. Digital Economy © Shutterstock The relentless race to develop innovative products of a higher quality, while reducing product costs and the time-to-market has been proven to be a major challenge for all industrial companies. Most companies lack the financial capacity either to invest in the latest technology as it reaches the market or to hire specialists to integrate new methodologies into their manufacturing processes. On the other hand, many companies have the required corporate breadth of experience to improve their manufacturing process if they could only make best use of knowledge and expertise internally. Technical and empirical knowledge coming from all participants in the product value chain can be stored, evaluated and managed in an efficient way to foster innovation with the AIM system. Combining the ideas and feedback from all parts of the product life cycle, it encourages team-working between people from different sites, including customer services, field engineers and suppliers. Methods and dedicated tools for collecting innovative ideas, complementing another important source of knowledge coming from problems and potential improvement points are included in the AIM system. Keeping in mind that the gap between knowledge and its respective use has to be eliminated, all the knowledge collected is evaluated in two phases, enabling functional and financial assessments. Information that describes products and industrial processes along with the results provided by the AIM tools are classified and stored as potential improvements or causes for problems identified. A collection of methods, oriented towards finding robust solutions to be applied in the industrial environment provides structured means for developing ideas stored in the ideas repository into innovation concepts. Moreover, the AIM system supports an efficient way for planning and monitoring the use of innovation knowledge during the design of new processes and products. The project partners' intention was to further offer customisation services for adapting the AIM toolkit as a complete software package to its customers' individual structure and developing interfaces with legacy systems.
