Identifying Innovative Documents: Quo vadis?

The number of new research documents and patents published each year is steadily increasing. Despite this development, identifying innovative documents in a timely manner has received only little attention in research. Nevertheless, this use case is important for companies that strive to keep up with current innovations in their field. However, since existing solutions do not take context and background of the particular firm or researcher into account, they fall short in supporting the user in his search for suitable documents. In this paper, we describe an industrial case study we conducted within sheet-metal working companies and related research institutes in Germany. We i) report a qualitative study on innovation research, ii) provide a list of features that industrial researchers demanded, and iii) discuss implementation challenges for systems that support interactive retrieval of innovative documents. Based on the initial results, we argue that existing systems fall short to provide an integrated workflow. Overall, we discuss how to implement such a system and the corresponding problems.