Enabling the Democratization of Innovation with Smart Toolkits (published @ Proceedings of ICIS 2017)
The International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2017 in Seoul, S. Korea will include this paper on Smart Toolkits as part of its theme track “Transforming Society with Digital Innovation“. Do have a look at the presentation on Wednesday 13.12.2017 and the published proceedings accessible at the AIS electronic library.
Abstract: Toolkits for user innovation and design democratize innovation by offering users a solution space to develop solutions that meet their diverse needs. Advancements in manufacturing and IS have given users space for creativity and innovation and the danger of overloading users with too many design decisions, especially when they also have unknown implicit needs. This design science study presents a toolkit that generates and recommends complete solutions to users. It identifies users’ implicit needs with a critiquing technique, where users iteratively evaluate recommendations by visually inspecting and selecting matching solutions. It presents artifacts that make up the toolkit and its evaluation by comparing it with a traditional toolkit. The smart toolkit further expands innovation capabilities to society by learning the needs of users and enabling them with completed solutions instead of the traditional toolkit approach, where users follow a slower, manual, learning-by-doing search process through the needs and solution space.