Making invisible patterns , visible

The other day I was revisiting some of the brainstorming exercises that were recommended for coming up with new products. Some recommended Idea joggers were: - What if we made it bigger? Smaller? Combined it with X, Made component X with material Y instead and so on. And then - I was struck how close this is to biological innovation (evolution). Where genes are mutated. The brainstorming was to mutate the core "genes" of the product. The "genes" being of course the key attributes about the product or service. e.g size, color,price etc. Now genetic programming has been around for a while with algorithms to mimic evolution and mutate genes and then evaluate them with fitness functions ie discard bad variations because they do not meet the 'fitness' or survivability test. So do you think that genetic programming ought to be in the management tool bag for innovation, along with the traditional "brainstorming". Actually- identifying the core "gene

Large Searchable Datasets about the world are being stored online- and the data flow is increasing to a flood. This includes web content (crawled , indexed, ranked by Google). Public records( by many organizations including LexisNexis). In addition people are dumping personal content - into the Cloud via emails and postings on Facebook , Twitter and other Social Sites and Forums. As new sensors and cameras are developed - even more data will be captured and stored. Now raw data by itself is sometimes hard to interpret and therefore it's usefulness is diminished -- But when it is tagged and annotated - it's like the raw stuff has been nicely packaged. The tagging makes it useful - because now it is searchable and linkable to the appropriate context. This is what Augmented Reality solutions are about. You point your iPhone camera at a scene and the GPS gives you the location, the accelerometer /compass gives you which way you are looking. Based on this -- information about the lo