Exploring Semantic Infrastructure Development For Open Innovation

Open innovation (OI) can be seen as systematically encouraging and exploring a wide range of internal and external sources for innovation opportunities, consciously integrating that exploration with firm capabilities and resources, and broadly exploiting those opportunities through multiple channels (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). In order to determine organizational competences or technological capabilities for open innovation, we explore the characteristics of open source software development projects as successful examples how organizations can enhance their businesses by using the ideas of open innovation. Hafkesbrink & Schroll, 2009, clustered organizational competences for open innovation in digital economy in three dimensions of: organizational readiness, collaborative capabilities and absorptive capacities. As a backbone of each of these dimensions appear the technological enhancement and existing of adequate collaboration and communication tools. One of the main benefits of the Semantic Web (SW) approach is the ability to model a knowledge structure using ontology as the starting point. Ontologies are highly suitable to represent consensus knowledge and its structure. This is exactly what is needed to exchange information within a community of interest and to enable automated processing of information items. SW technologies have the potential to improve information processing and knowledge sharing, increasing the quality of current applications and providing more sophisticated features for end users, but most of these theoretical advantages are not easily exploitable by real world applications (Lara et all, 2002). In this article we explore possibilities of semantic web infrastructure development to support organizational competences for open innovation. The idea is not new and it seems that the SW is very suitable for OI infrastructure requirements, but both disciplines recorded a decade of development without significant mutual application of research results. In order to identify the obstacles to intensive common development, we made the SWOT analysis for introduction of SW technologies in this stage of development as a main infrastructure for open innovation organization.