Abstract
Most large enterprises have departments that are themselves solely responsible for research and development targeted at technological innovations in new products and processes. Smaller manufacturers, however, often do not have a formal process established. Management of technological innovation in these companies is either non-existent or is undertaken by a single authority, often the owner. To assist in this process, through interviews, focus group discussions and site visits with small manufacturing firms, a large set of cases on technological innovation activities that were or were not successful was collected and organized in a knowledge base. It was realized that factors involved in even attempting an innovation were so complicated that success depended mostly on the intuition and experience of the decision maker. The tool described in this paper is a Similarity Based Reasoning (SBR) methodology that attempts to transfer this intuition from those who have it to those who do not.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.