Intermediary Design for Collaborative Ontology-Based Innovation Monitoring

Issues, Controversies, Problems

While existing approaches focus either on the participating SMEs, and supporting communications between them, capturing the knowledge of the non-executive workers, or capturing the users’ knowledge, business perspectives on integrated platforms for innovation management are few, far in between, and often not satisfactory documented from a scientific perspective. We present in this work an approach integrating a wider set of stakeholders in the Open Innovation process, tools for innovation management, and underlying technologies. We document it by presenting a reference architecture for an innovation management intermediary integrating a comprehensive set of components, and demonstrate overall viability and fit of the components in a wider business platform supporting innovation management in SMEs. We specifically focus on the contributions of ontologies in creating business value as basis technology for the platform and by enabling integration within the ecosystem.