Towards Multidisciplinary Support Tools for Innovation Tasks

This paper highlights the imperative need for innovation and characterizes a promising support tool to stimulate this process. The importance of innovation for both a global economy and specifically for engineering education is discussed. Additionally, the urgency for multidisciplinary skills for inventors is rationalized. Our ongoing research developments of automated function modeling based on CAD models is presented. The layout of an innovation support tool integrating CAD, function and math-based models is presented enabling innovators to perform multidisciplinary conceptual design studies more quickly. In a case study, the tool's efficiency and effectiveness are demonstrated especially for displaying state changes of the Function Model.