A meta model of the innovation process to support the decision making process using structural complexity management

The innovation process is characterized by numerous interactions of numerous domains. Cyclic interdependencies intensify the pressure in terms of quality and schedule, causing shortened testing phases, frequent releases of new models, and thus hardly calculable risks. Structural Complexity management is established in order to avoid wrong decisions, instable processes and error-prone solutions. Therefore, Structural Complexity Management evaluates system's characteristics by analyzing system's underlying structures across multiple domains, condensing each single analysis into one big matrix that represents multiple domains at a time. Identifying suitable perspectives, generating suitable models and using suitable analyze criteria are the challenges in this field. In order to support the manufacturing of innovative products and thus the evaluation and interpretation of the system's underlying structure this paper proposes a meta model. The created model describes the author's perspective on entities arising during the innovations process and their interactions. The proposed model is used to simplify the decision making processes and to enable the management of cyclic interdependencies during the innovation process.