KNOWLEDGE-BASED APPROACH TO AFFORDABLE TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

Based on an ongoing project, the paper aims at showing that radical technological innovation is affordable (as time, cost and effort) in current industrial environments if reigning development paradigms are replaced by Knowledge-Society paradigms (examples: "Just in Time (JIT)", "Computing as Interaction", anthropocentric design). Merging two research strands - quality management and agent-orientation - led to the first Romanian project to apply agent-oriented paradigms in open, uncertain, and dynamic industrial environments: thus, it appears as one of the first European attempts to adjust quality management to the Knowledge Society, via agent-orientation. The approach is based on anthropocentrism, affordability, and a new mechanism for intelligent decision making. Among the conclusions: decision quality in industrial environments is significantly improved (as regards risk management, uncertainty, and time criticality) using just common configurations, if applications are devised in line with Knowledge-Society paradigms. The main limitation is cognitive: the major difficulties of paradigm shifting for both end-users and software developers.