Web-based innovation alert services to support product design evolution

Technological innovations provide an opportunity toimprove product performance and reduce cost. Therefore,
design organizations are interested in monitoring technological
innovations. A large number of innovations are announced
every year. Monitoring them manually is very time consuming.
We are developing web-based innovation-alert services that can
be used to monitor and communicate information about
innovations relevant to a particular product design. In this
paper, we discuss the required infrastructure, relevant design
issues, and our approach to developing web-based innovation
alert services to support product design evolution. We also
describe a prototype innovation monitoring service for
computer components and an interactive tool to transform
semi-structured web contents into semantic representations in
XML.