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The Innovation Engine for Team Building The EU Aristotele Approach

From Open Innovation to the Innovation Factory

Ernesto Damiani Paolo Ceravolo


Universit degli Studi di Milano

Outline
Innovation Open Innovation The ARISTOTELE Innovation Factory

Recommendation in Collaborative Environments


Lesson Learned Future Works

Innovation
Innovation is the catalyst to economic growth. Joseph Schumpeter famously asserted that creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. Entrepreneurs continuously look for better ways to satisfy their consumer base with improved quality, durability, service, and price which come to fruition in innovation with advanced technologies and organizational strategies.

There are several sources of innovation. According to the Peter F. Drucker the general sources of innovations are different changes in industry structure, in market structure, in local and global demographics, in human perception, mood and meaning, in the amount of already available scientific knowledge, etc.

Open Innovation
Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand the markets (Chesbrough 2003). Innovation is seen as an outcome of a collision between technological opportunities and user needs. The focus is upon the interaction between producers and users. One outcome of this approach is a more realistic understanding of markets and vertical integration than the ones offered by neoclassical economics and transaction economics. Another outcome is treating research and development as collaborative and open systems.

ARISTOTELE Project
ARISTOTELE research project is an IP funded under the EC FP7. The aim is relating the learning process to the organizational one (including innovation process management). In particular:
Organizational processes (marketing&communication, human resources management, business) Learning processes (group training sessions) Social collaboration processes (spontaneous formation of groups within the organization)

Innovation Factory
Supports addressing ill-defined, vague needs and transforming them into requirements or virtual products Suggestions are derived based on open-innovationsources like help desk messages Reactive mode only (for now)

Innovation Factory

Innovation Factory

Innovation Factory

Methodologies to Foster the Innovation Factories (1)


Methodology can draw upon three different types of resources
Results of a Collaborative Innovation Framework that describes needs and general requirements for new products/services External Stimuli, posing challenges related to innovation and competence improvement, ordinarily, not specified in terms of resources Explicit enterprise knowledge formalized in instances of the ARISTOTELE models, mainly in the Knowledge, Competence and Worker models

Methodologies to Foster the Innovation Factories (2)


The information sources of innovation process are of three types:
Contributions coming from innovation workers, defining or brainstorming requirements for a new product

Contributions coming from partners (i.e. employees, suppliers, customers) who send comments and ideas that can be collected and transformed in requirements to be analyzed
Contribution from external sources, e.g. using a software crawler to analyze electronic resources and extract information (e.g. web site competitors, forums, blogs)

Methodologies to Foster the Innovation Factories (3)


The results of the methodology can be represented by:
Suggestions sets regarding new products or services Proposals of innovative activities and their impact on the organization Suggested interactions with experts and peers that may improve creativity in the organization

Workflow (1)
The outputs of the first stage of Innovation Factory (Virtual Product Designer) can be used to generate VPs

External Stimuli

Virtual Product Designer

Virtual Product

Recommender System

Suggestions

Innovation Support System

Explicit Organization Knowledge

Target: Working Team

Configuration Settings

Workflow (2)
The VP definition, annotated with requirements and requested competencies, is used as stimulus for the Recommender System
External Stimuli

Virtual Product Designer

Virtual Product

Recommender System

Suggestions

Innovation Support System

Explicit Organization Knowledge

Target: Working Team

Configuration Settings

Workflow (3)
Last stage of the workflow (Innovation Support System) gives suggestions to personal learning plans specific for workers profiles and organization needs
External Stimuli

Virtual Product Designer

Virtual Product

Recommender System

Suggestions

Innovation Support System

Explicit Organization Knowledge

Target: Working Team

Configuration Settings

Example (1)
Stimulus: A lot of complaints reach our help-desk Crawler selects some components, most turn out to be about lazy tech assistance Brainstorming in VP points at shorter response time, but highlight high marginal cost of achieving it

Example (2)
SM: guidelines on tech assistance DM: entries from champions blog praising good assistance Entries about latest read of champion, the book Neuromancer, is about small communities taking over

SERENDIPITY!!

Experiment
Seve teams. Each team was assigned with a task to be accomplish in a limited timespan The members of the team was placed in different rooms and was provided with IF (mikiwiki based) The IF was the only tool allowed for cooperating and communicating in the team, all other channels to access the web was disabled Four teams was set as experimental groups and was provided with the ARISTOTELE RS Three teams was set as control groups and was provided with the standard IF services

Experiment
H1: experimental groups will develop a communication process more linear, with less objections and rejects on the arguments proposed during the discussion

H2: experimental groups will develop the task in a more linear process, executing activities in a more ordered flow
H3: experimental groups will develop the task with better result in time management, distributing the activities on the whole timespan

Results: global activities performed

EX Teams

Results: global activities performed

CON Teams

Results: spec. activities performed

EX Teams

Results: spec. activities performed

CON Teams

Results: conversation actions

EX Teams

Results: conversation actions

CON Teams

Results: conversation flow

EX Teams

Results: conversation flow

CON Teams

Experimental Results
Hypothesis are confirmed
H1: experimental groups will develop a communication process more linear, with less objections and rejects on the arguments proposed during the discussion H2: experimental groups will develop the task in a more linear process, exe- cuting activities in a more ordered follow H3: experimental groups will develop the task with better result in time management, distributing the activities on the whole timespan

What does it means?

Overspecialisation Problem
RSs have reached in the last years a good level of accuracy Our experiment show that RSs can have good impact on reducing the overhead required to a tem for collaborating RSs however can create a close community RSs still fail in discovering users latent interests: they often suggest items that, although accurately tailored on the users past behavior, and create communities that are overspecified

The mentor approach


Modern RSs contaminate users experience with dissimilarity: dissimilarity can increase users satisfaction and stimulate latent interests

Mentor Approach: instead of choosing a random musical world, to exploit the knowledge of the best reputed users Instead of taking into consideration the set of all the items to select suggestions, we prefer items exploited by mentors
this means that this approach could for example prefer, as neighbour for a user Ui, user Uj respect to user Uz even if similarity(Ui, Uj) < similarity(Ui, Uz) if Uj is an eclectic user and Uj is not

Thank you

Any questions?

ADDITIONAL SLIDES

References
V. Bellandi, P. Ceravolo, E. Damiani, and F. Frati. CR2S: Competency Roadmap to Strategy. Proc. of 1st Int. Workshop on Knowledge Management and e-Human Resources Practices for Innovation (eHR-KM 11), 2011 R. Phaal, C.J.P. Farrukh, D.R. Probert. Technology roadmapping - A planning framework for evolution and revolution. In Technological Forecasting and Social Change 71:1, January 2004 F. Ricci, L. Rokach, B. Shapira, P.B. Kantor (Eds.). Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011 R. Maier. Knowledge Management Systems: Information and Communication Technologies for Knowledge Management. Knowledge Management. Springer, 2007 L. Iaquinta, M. de Gemmis, P. Lops, G. Semeraro. Recommendations toward Serendipitous Diversions. In Proc. of Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications, 2009 P. Ceravolo, E. Damiani, M. Viviani. Bottom-up Extraction and Trust-based Refinement of Ontology Metadata. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 19 (2), 2007 G. Adomavicius, A. Tuzhilin. Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 17(6), 2005 P.S. Adler, C. Heckscher. Towards Collaborative Community. In The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy. Oxford University Press, 2006 A. Hargadon, R.I. Sutton. Innovation Factory. Harvard Business Review, 2000 C. Edquist. Systems Of Innovation: Perspectives and Challenges. In J. Fagerberg, D. C. Mowery, & R. R. Nelson (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Innovation. New York., 2005

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