Maturity Oriented Description Model for Innovation Ideas of Technical Systems

Today, innovation is more crucial for companies than ever. The prerequisite for every innovation is an innovation idea (referred to as “idea” within this paper). Especially the implementation of ideas for technical systems requires financial and capacitive resources. Due to resource constraints, companies only pursue the most promising ideas. The understanding of a promising idea may differ from company to company. Therefore, an evaluation process, including company specific evaluation criteria, is applied in order to identify those promising ideas. The basis of this evaluation process is the idea description, presenting all relevant aspects of an idea in a structured manner. Today’s existing models for the description of ideas require a specific type and format of information (the so called “specification format”). However, these specification formats remain unchanged over the course of the idea development process. Consequently, the same type and format of information are used to describe any idea of any development status. This regularly leads to a distorted idea description, ultimately resulting in an erroneous basis for the idea evaluation. To prevent this, the idea description model has to be oriented at the idea’s current development status. Therefore, this paper aims at the development of a model for the maturity oriented description of ideas for technical systems assuring both a meaningful as well as efficient idea description.