A research agenda for computing developments associated with innovation pipelines

Over the past few decades, our industrial age has entered into an important phase in its evolution: innovation. While innovation could proclaim underlying political and strategic intentions when it was still in the early stages, it must now assert itself in the form of tangible and measurable methodological approaches backed by tools that are designed to provide stakeholders with services at every phase of the innovation process. The world of standardization has already perceived the need to standardize and measure innovation. However, it has perhaps not yet anticipated that any form of measurement is only meaningful if our computing tools have been sufficiently developed to cope with this evolution. Indeed, while the age of quality saw the emergence and firm anchoring of several tools in our industrial practice, the age of innovation is still focused on research in the fields of marketing and management, and any initiatives that dare attempt to structure its deployment via radical changes in what is currently known, practised and acknowledged in the business environment today, are thin on the ground. This article traces the historical facts that legitimize the emergence of a new age for tools allowing computer-aided artefact creation and proposes a research agenda for the scientific communities involved.