Cahoots: a Software Platform for Enhancing Innovation and Facilitating Situation Transfer

We introduce a new software platform called Cahoots for enhancing innovation in both groups and individuals. The word cahoots means working together. Cahoots possesses two main features. First, Cahoots embodies a visualization method that is intuitive for users and matches the pattern of successful problem solving. Second, a standardized problem solving grammar is natural for users to express themselves and guides them to express goals in a function-focused manner—a manner that is suited for the automated finding of analogous solutions (i.e. situation transfers). Both visual and linguistic representations meet the requirements of being intuitive to use and robust at modeling the task—and thus are what we call ergosemantic (i.e. from the ergonomic study of semantic representations). Cahoots is a software platform that enhances innovation by facilitating both human-human collaboration and human-machine collaboration.