KM system to support incremental innovation in manufacturing industry

This paper presents a novel approach aiming to develop a complete Knowledge Management (KM) system to support the collection of innovative ideas and relevant knowledge throughout the extended enterprise for new and existing process and product developments, and to develop these ideas and knowledge into a means of fostering industrial innovation. The main objective of the approach presented is to develop a means of stimulating the creation of innovative ideas in general, and specifically on problem solving and on potential product/ process improvements, and collecting them from people involved with the products and processes. This paper starts by briefly describing the motivation that has led to this work, as well as the project AIM, Acceleration of Innovative ideas to Market, under which the approach is being developed. Afterwards, an overview of the methodology and the AIM system is presented, and finally some of the business cases that the project is dealing with (both large multinational enterprises and SMEs) are described.