A case-based reasoning approach to generating new product ideas

This paper presents an approach to facilitate the generation of new product ideas. In this approach, a product is represented by a vector, which involves a number of product attributes. These attributes are defined based on the user-centered design (UCD) paradigm. That is, the context of use and interactions with users for the product is described by these attributes. By the product representation, a product database can be established. For a benchmarking product, we use the case-based reasoning (CBR) technique to retrieve those products, which are "sufficiently relevant" to the benchmarking one, from the database. The functions of the retrieved products are the candidate new ideas to be added on the benchmarking product. These retrieved products are screened manually to identify creative and valuable ideas. A prototype system of this approach has been implemented. Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms the brainstorming technique, which has been widely used in industry.