Traceability recovery for innovation processes

Nowadays, innovation is a competitive business advantage. In practice, innovation and engineering are two distinct process steps with an information handover in between. Often only design prototypes are handed over that present the overall concept, but justify design decisions only partially. However, engineers require thorough knowledge about design rationales when getting the innovation ready for the market. Therefore, innovation processes need to support traceability to enable the retrieval of design rationales. But, existing approaches for documenting innovation processes rather focus on capturing artifacts than enabling the retrieval of traceability information. Furthermore, existing traceability approaches often cannot be employed, because they rely on structured artifacts.

In this paper, we present a traceability recovery approach for innovation processes that enables traceability for unstructured artifacts as often used in innovation processes by employing recovery modules, which jointly recover traceability information. We demonstrate and evaluate our approach using the innovation methodology of Design Thinking.