On the Nature of Innovation: Towards a Structural and Behavioural Characterization

In its essence, innovation is commonly perceived as a process, i.e., a set of activities that are able to intervene and change for better one or more business elements. However, an innovation process is different from a usual business process. Innovation belongs to the category of creative endeavours that exhibit loosely structured processes difficult to be modelled and managed with the ‘usual’ methods. For these reasons, the present paper proposes a process reification method and develops the concept of innovation as an evolving entity. Such an entity, referred to as Innnogothci, is structured and managed according to a knowledge representation method, Topic Maps, that exhibit a number of convenient features for our purpose.