This paper presents a three-stage system that sustains customer-driven innovation. The stages comprise: (1) "raw materials" (concept elements, via ideation, competitive intelligence, blue sky thinking), (2) enabling technology (the computer) that combines these ideas into new concepts, and (3) an integrative system (the customer), who rates these systematically varied concepts on interest and on fit to new situations or appropriate for end uses. The database system creates concepts by re-combining features in new and different ways to fit objectives. Innovation now becomes sustainable, as long as the raw material (elements) can be created, and as long as the end use / situation can be defined (e.g., by video).

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