Semantic Representation of Innovation, Generic Ontology for Idea Management

Innovation is currently recognized as an essential competitive enabler for any organization that wants to survive and grow. In addition, organizations feel a growing need to open up their internal innovation processes and to integrate innovation management tools. But, due to the distributed and heterogeneous characteristics of innovation knowledge, it becomes more difficult to manage the innovation process effectively and efficiently. However, the emerging and rapid development of semantic web technologies brings new opportunities. In this paper, a novel modular ontology that provides a semantic representation of innovation and a common language to foster interoperability, declarativity, and intelligent services between tools and to support the innovation life cycle is introduced. Our Innovation Management Ontology consists of three sub-ontologies that refer to three factors, which are: innovation core -Idea-, innovation actor and innovation context, we have identified as cornerstones of any successful innovation.