A Knowledge-centric Approach to Virtual Enterprise Innovation

Innovation is probably one of the most popular terms, used in different contexts, when talking about the future. From economic contexts, where it is used to indicate a key strategy to go out of the current critical economic phase, to business contexts, where it is clear that without innovation a company cannot survive. In this paper we propose an ontology-based approach to business innovation. The proposal is based on a reference framework: BIRF (Business Innovation Reference Framework) and a novel, document-centric approach. The document-centric approach starts from the idea that chasing innovation by defining specific processes will turn in imposing limitations to imagination and creativity. Conversely, the documents represents sharable traces of inspirations, ideas, and all the knowledge that is collected and produced during an innovation initiative. But documents need to be semantically enriched, therefore, the central pillar of our approach is a federation of ontologies aimed at supporting the unconstrained, imaginative adventure of innovation.