An Innovation Strategy for Virtual Factories based on Open Innovation, Mobile Technology and Linked Data

The pace of technological and social change profoundly impacts the manufacturing and service industry and determines an important driver for competitiveness. The EU Project ComVantage aims at addressing the limitations of the existing manufacturing ICT infrastructure by making use of the advantages of mobile and semantic technology. Along the use case of a micro company working in the textile industry we present the prototypical implementation of how small companies can leverage their ability to compete in a global market by collaborating together as a virtual factory, and how they can offer innovative services by integrating their end-customers’ knowledge. We use lightweight and affordable mobile technology as infrastructure for connecting data from different business partners including the customers and present a new approach for building industrial mobile applications. Semantic technologies allow easy integration of different data sources and high flexibility, therefore we apply Linked Data principles for easily retrieving, exchanging and publishing information about products, user generated content or public information from the Linked Open Data web.