Interactive knowledge acquisition for concept development of consumer products

The paper describes a novel method for computer aided strategic concept formation in the early stage of product development. This method combines interactive evolutionary computing (IEC) and machine learning techniques. It enables the user to generate a creative and well-grounded product concept based on marketing strategy, while also stimulating the user to clarify the product concept idea he/she had in mind. The system called BICSS was developed based on this method. The proposed method has been qualitatively validated by a case study.