Magnifying Innovation: Understanding Organizations’ Adoption of Novel Design Practices

为了继续加强对美国经济至关重要的创新并应对关键的社会挑战，从董事会高管到基础初创企业的关键创新驱动因素必须开发和采用新的更好的创新流程。这项工作的主要目标是了解工业设计组织如何以及为什么采用创新方法，以及为什么不这样做，并确定并将方法采用的最佳实践传递给学术和工业创新社区。该项目将通过研究目前在大型工业研发环境中混合采用的方法和实践，来调查新创新方法的采用情况。特别是，这些研究将以采用生物灵感设计(BID)和专利挖掘(PM)为目标，这两种方法对当今的社会挑战特别及时和相关，以确定与采用新设计方法的成功或失败相关的特征。设计研究关注的是开发工具和方法，通过提高效率或效力或两者兼而有之，沿着一个或另一个维度(例如，减少生成新设计的时间，生成更多创新设计，用更少的资源生成设计，使用辅助技术)来改进设计。然而，尽管我们尽了最大努力，我们发现通过研究开发的工具和方法很少在工业环境中广泛采用。这项研究计划试图通过关注两种新兴的设计方法的采用周期来了解工业采用新设计方法的障碍和催化剂：生物灵感设计(BID)和专利挖掘(PM)。每种方法都被选为当前设计趋势的代表：跨学科、可持续设计和数据增强型设计。这项对复杂设计系统的调查将寻求了解大型工业研发创新者(包括全球500强品牌的创新者)和大型政府研发机构的设计需求，它们是更大的创新生态系统中设计方法领域强大影响力的子集。我们将从一系列半结构化访谈开始，以确定采用的障碍和催化剂，然后是广泛分布的调查，以了解更大样本中的设计方法经验。最后一阶段将通过比较三种传播模式：研讨会、与行业合作的项目和为期一学期的远程学习课程，提供对生物灵感设计和专利挖掘的现场、非回溯性分析。综上所述，这些研究将使我们能够三角测量常见的做法和模式，这将有助于未来的研究人员指导、传播和采用他们的工作。这项研究的另一个成果将是一个工业研究人员网络，他们可能被用于未来的这类工作，以及一套减少学术和工业合作伙伴之间的“研究摩擦”的操作协议。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

To continue to enhance the innovation that is essential for the US economy and to address critical societal challenges, new and better processes for innovation must be both developed and adopted by key innovation drivers - from boardroom executives to basement startups. The primary goal of this work is to understand how and why industrial design organizations adopt innovation methods or fail to do so, and to identify and transfer best practices for method adoption to the academic and industrial innovation communities. The project will investigate the adoption of new innovation methods through the study of methods and practices that are currently receiving mixed adoption in large industrial R&D settings. In particular, the studies will target the adoption of Biologically Inspired Design (BID) and Patent Mining (PM), which are particularly timely and relevant to today’s societal challenges, in order to identify the characteristics associated with the success or failure to adopt new design methods. Design research is concerned with developing tools and methods to enhance design, either by increasing efficiency or effectiveness or both, along one dimension or another (e.g., to reduce the time to generate a new design, to generate more innovative designs, to generate designs with fewer resources, to employ assistive technologies). Yet, despite our best efforts, we find that the tools and methods developed through research are rarely broadly adopted in industrial settings. This research program seeks to understand both the barriers and catalysts of industrial adoption of new design methods by focusing on the adoption cycles of two novel and rising methods of design: Biologically Inspired Design (BID) and Patent Mining (PM). Each method was selected as representative of current trends in design: interdisciplinarity, sustainable design, and data-enhanced design. This investigation of the complex system of design will seek to understand the design needs of large industrial R&D innovators (including those of Global 500 brands) and large government R&D organizations as a subset of strong influencers in the design methods domain within a much larger innovation ecosystem. We will begin with a series of semi-structured interviews to identify barriers and catalysts to adoption, followed by widely distributed surveys to understand experiences with design methods in a much larger sample. The final stage will provide in situ, non-retrospective analysis of Biologically Inspired Design and Patent Mining by comparing three modes of dissemination: workshops, collaborative projects with industry, and semester-long distance learning courses. Taken together, these studies will allow us to triangulate among common practices and patterns that will assist future researchers with the direction, dissemination, and adoption of their work. Another outcome of this research will be a network of industrial researchers who may be leveraged for future work of this type, along with a set of operating protocols for reducing “research friction” within academic and industrial partnerships.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.