COOP2002- Workshop on “Project Memory” 7

Supporting the Memory of Projects for Innovation in Manufacturing

Stefania Bandini, Sara Manzoni, Carla Simone
DISCO- University of Milano-Bicocca
{bandini,manzoni,simone}@disco.unimib.it

For manufacturing companies acting in highly competitive contexts the notions of “project”
and “innovation” are closely related. Projects are launched to answer requests either coming
from the market or derived from new needs induced on the market to enhance the company
capability to enlarge its market share (Hutterback, 1996). In these contexts, innovation is a
process, running in parallel with production processes requiring procedures, protocols,
structures, and investments to be suitably designed, engineered, applied, and kept under strict
control to achieve efficiency. Production processes must guarantee the reproducibility and the
reuse of already existing successful products, that is, concrete solutions to previously defined
sets of needs, requirements, and constraints, according to which their performance is evaluated.
Being realized through projects, the innovation process is characterized by their life-cycle.
The latter is strictly dependent on the nature of the company, the products it produces, the
culture and practices it developed. However, the life-cycle of projects for innovation contains
phases that are common to many situations: typically, the conception of the innovative features
(in terms of products, production processes or both); the prototyping of preliminary solutions;
their in-door evaluation (e.g., in laboratories); the experimentation of satisfactory results in the
real production settings; and obviously, all the necessary feedback loops to solve problems
emerging in all the above phases in order to reach final results (in terms of products and their
production processes) that become part of the standard production of the company. This
however does not conclude the innovation process. In fact, the experience gained during
standard production can provide hints and results that trigger new innovation processes or at
least a resumption of some of them into new projects for innovation.
In all the above phases, the core knowledge of the company plays a central role. In fact,
innovation is achieved not only through the technological competences of the involved actors
but also through lessons learned in communities of practices (Seely Brown and Duguid, 2000)
where actors acquire knowledge of how the characteristics of the company and of its market
make competences able to produce affordable innovation. In other terms, an essential part of
the core knowledge is experiential in nature. Moreover, experiential knowledge plays a
fundamental role when innovation is achieved through adaptation of existing products/processes
or subassemblies of them. This is often the case in highly competitive sectors where time to
market is an essential constraint and core competences determine the advantage over the
competitors (Prahalad and Hamel, 2000).
Experience is derived from the direct application of knowledge in problem solving on a
specific domain, and allows one to structure explicit knowledge and accumulate tacit
knowledge. The latter is the most valuable one, and can be considered as a measurement of the
value of a skillful actor. Experience means having dealt with several cases during time,
regardless whether successful or not. The role of failure in the accumulation of experience is in
fact a key factor for learning. However, when core and experienced competencies are embedded
in some organized environment, the phenomenon of failure removal is very common, because
of conventional and psychological factors.
The capitalization of knowledge derived from experience in a production environment is a
very hard problem in knowledge management, especially when innovation is considered. The
idea that structured collections of documents and reports on cases (often supported by
automated systems) can provide a solution to the problem is just a way to oversimplify the
solution. Similarly, the idea that innovation is mainly produced by unstructured activities
supporting creativity (typically, meetings of experts) is another form of simplification.
Innovation is the outcome of “soft” intuitions interleaved with “hard” activities close to the
production processes. The capitalization of knowledge toward innovation has to consider both
of them, and how they are interrelated.
 COOP2002- Workshop on “Project Memory” 8

The above considerations lead to look for technological supports that, beside organizational
practices and incentives, are focused on the valorization of experience on the one hand (Aha
and Weber, 2000), and on the other hand on the organization of the related knowledge
according to the dynamic nature of the innovation process as it is realized in the specific
context. Starting from the cases (as reification of experience) and considering the
contextualized life-cycle of projects for innovation seems a fruitful approach to build a project
memory that is constructed from local practices, and can therefore be used and shared by
competent actors with reduced re-interpretation problems.
Specifically, we are experimenting this approach by considering the Case Based Reasoning
(CBR) paradigm (Altdorf, 2001) CBR allows experiential knowledge to be captured without
requiring a predefined model of the problem solving mechanisms. Instead, CBR focuses on
experience and looks for pragmatic categories to describe and compare cases, that is, episodes
where a problem or a problematic situation was partially or totally solved. At the highest level
of generality, the CBR cycle may be divided into the following four steps :
- RETRIEVE the most similar case(s);
- REUSE the information and knowledge in the case retrieved to solve the problem;
- REVISE the proposed solution;
- RETAIN the parts of this experience likely to be useful for future problem solving by
incorporating them into the existing knowledge-base.
Several applications of CBR have been developed, for example, for classification, diagnosis,
planning, decision support, information retrieval, configuration, and design. Using the CBR
paradigm in knowledge management is still a challenge from many points of view. In fact,
although the characteristics of the CBR cycle fit the needs described above, the challenge is to
characterize cases in the appropriate way to capture the dynamic aspects of innovation, to define
retrieving strategies that fit the needs of skillful actors involved in the innovation process, and
finally to collect cases from the every day activities and the related technological supports. In
this respect, manufacturing adopts information artifacts that can be used to this purpose.
Our experimentation is realized in cooperation with Italian companies that consider projects