Abstract
New products are frequently launched in the world. Most of new products could be regarded as combinations of characteristics of existing products. All the combinations do not always become seeds of new selling products. Each existing product has functions. A new function may be thought up by combining two functions of existing products. If a new function is novel, a combination may be a seed of a new selling product. This paper proposes an evaluation method of novelty of new functions obtained from product functions for supporting idea generation. The system makes phrases representing new functions, and evaluates whether each of new functions is novel or not using Web hit counts. The system outputs products combinations with novel functions. We conducted evaluation experiments, and verified that the proposed system can support participants in idea generation.
