Semantic Innovation Management

Innovation within industrial environment can be viewed as a cyclic loop consisting of four distinct phases, i.e., recognition, initiation, implementation, and stabilization. Different information technology enabled innovation management tools supporting the lifecycle of innovation are classified as five layers, i.e., individual innovation, project innovation, collaborative innovation, distributed innovation, and semantic innovation. According the fact that the current state is evolving from distributed innovation to semantic innovation, this paper focus on the realization of Semantic Web technologies enabled semantic innovation. To explicitly and formally specify all the different perspectives of innovation related information, a shared ontology is proposed as the common language of innovation management, which describes the critical and minimal information about the innovation process in a holistic way. Then, a technical framework which employs the machine readable innovation ontology to actually improve innovation management inside an organization and among loosely coupled organizations is presented. Finally, some features of the semantic innovation are discussed.