  Large repositories of products, patents and scientific papers offer an
opportunity for building systems that scour millions of ideas and help users
discover inspirations. However, idea descriptions are typically in the form of
unstructured text, lacking key structure that is required for supporting
creative innovation interactions. Prior work has explored idea representations
that were either limited in expressivity, required significant manual effort
from users, or dependent on curated knowledge bases with poor coverage. We
explore a novel representation that automatically breaks up products into
fine-grained functional aspects capturing the purposes and mechanisms of ideas,
and use it to support important creative innovation interactions: functional
search for ideas, and exploration of the design space around a focal problem by
viewing related problem perspectives pooled from across many products. In user
studies, our approach boosts the quality of creative search and inspirations,
substantially outperforming strong baselines by 50-60%.
