Semantic-based framework for innovation management

In a turbulent and more competition-oriented environment, organizations need to develop their ability to adapt quickly. To be able to adapt, an organization must, of course, be innovative and attractive, and successful innovation should be carefully planned and efficiently managed. Even if some researchers treat the early stages of innovation as "fuzzy" because of their uncertainty, we suppose, as many others that a well structured processes, a clear representation and a good designed management framework are crucial for the ultimate success of any innovation. Understanding the process of innovation is to understand the factors that facilitate and inhibit the success of innovations. A best understanding of how these factors are related will lead to define a proper representation and an efficient management framework supporting the innovation full lifecycle. In addition, organizations have become more aware of external knowledge and technology to maintain their competitiveness in the global market and they feel a growing need to open up their innovation processes. Therefore, to achieve successful innovation in an open context, it is necessary to overcome the challenge of integrating distributed and heterogeneous knowledge management systems. The emerging and rapid development of semantic technologies brings new opportunities and provides a promising direction for such challenge. Semantic technologies focus on the formalization of knowledge to create schemes that allow knowledge to be effectively stored, modified, shared, exchanged and reasoned. In this paper, a semantically-powered framework for innovation management is presented. This framework includes a new Lifecycle Model supporting all activities of innovation with a special focus on its front end stages; a Semantic Representation of innovation, based on three factors we have identified as cornerstones of any successful innovation and that supports a set of automatic and intelligent services such as annotation, relationship retrieval and semantic search; used to power the Core Services of our framework that aim to promote innovation, notably within an open context.