Tags: crowdsourcing, risk management, open innovation, SME innovation, lieda amaral
The Innovation Capability of SMEs
by Liêda Amaral de Souza

How can people, IT tools, structure, culture, and power be connected in order to leverage collective abilities for applying available knowledge to solve problems and search for opportunities (organizational intelligence), accommodating new experience (organizational learning), and producing new ideas and things (organizational creativity) so that the group of organizational members can effectively contribute to the organizational well-being? You could answer some questions like these visiting the KMOWL web site.
KMOWL is a Special Interest Group in Knowledge Management that carries out interdisciplinary Research and Development projects as well as Education projects, with the aim of developing systematic and comprehensive approaches to the organizational process of knowledge management. These approaches are to built upon the theoretical and methodological tools developed in scientific fields such as sociology, psychology, management, cognitive scieces, neuroscience and information systems.
That’s right that open innovation refers to the ability of firms to open themselves up to external networks and relationships in order to gain the full potential of their investments in innovation. How creating an open innovation action system and managing innovative projects… maybe the answef for this question is an open innovation business ecosystem…
In this context, prof. PhD Isabel Ramos is cordinating and improving a research crowdsourcing innovation group, that aims to promote the innovation capability of SMEs and economic value of knowledge and creativity of high qualified individuals and small research teams. That´s a open innovation business ecosystem!
A business ecosystem is an economic community crossing many industries working together (cooperatively) and competitively in production, innovative customer service and innovation process.
But we know that crowdsourcing innovation need to be tailored and controlled in all steps.and we think that since platforms are repositories of knowledge, potential contributors need access to build their own business model and value proposition.
Advised by Prof Isabel, Cândida Elisa a PhD Student is researching about knowledge repositories for crowdsourcing innovation.
“A knowledge repository is a system that supports all kind of data, from a variety of heterogeneous sources, such as structured data […] The main functions of a knowledge repository are the capture, storage, maintenance and retrieval of knowledge from all the available sources. These functions must include both the capabilities for assimilating knowledge from outside (such as competitive intelligence systems acquiring information about other companies in the same industry) and capabilities for creating new knowledge from the reinterpretation and reformulation of existing and newly acquired information”. (Cândida Elisa, 2008) .
In this era, generically known as the information age, there is a dramatically need for changing the way companies access information. The Web 2.0 collaborative society, supporting new ways of accessing, exchanging and promoting information, may transform its workers, the knowledge workers, in the basis of a sustainable platform organizations may use to get competitive advantages and innovate. We believe that the management of organizational memory, sustained in its three forms of intellectual capital is, therefore, essential and, up to the moment, difficult to achieve, as no significant and practical results were produced to improve it. Luis Mourão, another PhD Student advised by Prof. Isabel Ramos is improving a research project that aims to develop a systemic approach to allow the diagnose and intervention in organizational memory, seen as a dynamic system, gathering all its components into a useful model capable to provide the knowledge about the distributed capacity an organization has to capture and mobilize knowledge serving as the base to the development of a diagnostic and intervention model in organizational memory, as well as the construction of a prototype to support the monitoring of organizational memory evolution.

What are the risks associated with crowdsourcing innovation brokering, both internal to an organization or externally available by brokering businesses? What should be risk management model for crowdsourcing innovation? What kind of information system should be defined to effectively support the management of risks associated with crowdsourcing innovation?

My PhD research is focused on producing a methodology to manage risks associated with crowdsourcing innovation, delivered by internal or external brokers, and on defining the functional and informational requirements of an information system to support risk management to empower managers preventing and / or mitigating the materialization of risks in innovation brokering services specialized in the innovation needs of technology based firms

Tags: crowdsourcing, living labs, future-center, innovation brokering, business model, social media, inovação aberta, lieda amaral


What is Open Innovation?
The concept of open innovation (OI) is related to (but distinct from) user innovation, cumulative innovation and distributed innovation.
Open innovation has emerged as a model where firms commercialize both external and internal ideas andtechnologies and use both
external and internal resources.

The central idea dissemined by Henry Chesbrough is that in a world
of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely
entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions from other companies. In addition, internal inventions not being used in a firm's business should be taken
outside the company.






Social Media and Business Model


by VTT Tiedotteita Research Notes



It’s nice to see the RESEARCH NOTES 2384 (Technical Research Centre of Finland, Kangas, Petteri, Toivonen, Santtu & Bäck, Asta (eds.). “Ads by Google” and other social media business models. Espoo 2007. VTT Tiedotteita – Research Notes 2384. 59 p.) “Ads by Google. and other social media business models” , focusing on social media, sociality in innovation and business model. It concludes that social media is becoming more and more attractive to Web users. However, the majority of social media services do not have a clear business model.


At the moment there are a few alternative business models, of which four larger themes are reported: Crowd-sourcing, revenue sharing between services and users, developing and selling underlying technologies, and adopting social media tools and approaches for professional use. Some examples of these approaches already exist. The report also identifies and defines some core concepts of social media, as well as investigates various phenomena co-occurring with social media, namely user activeness,identity, copyrights, mobility, trust, and side-effects.









The innovation process

We can see the steps of the innovation process at the Swiss SME Portal. The core of the innovation process is formed by the company and its employees. Coupled with the corporate culture, strategy, and structure, they strongly determine the innovation process from the centre.



“New combinations, that is, do new things or a new way of doing things that are made is vital for the development of organizations” Schumpeter, 1947







O que é inovação aberta?



É um conceito que expressa uma das formas de se fazer inovação.

Parte-se do princípio que dada a quantidade de conhecimento disponível externo às organizações, quer seja no mercado ou na academia, é mais proveitoso para uma organização adquirir externamente algo já pronto do que começar uma investigação (pesquisa) do princípio, ou seja, partindo do marco zero.

Imagina-se que em algum lugar esteja disponível o conhecimento necessário para sua organização inovar em algum produto ou processo que a sua empresa esteja necessitando ainda desenvolver.

Sob essa ótica não a necessidade de as empresas manterem centros de P&D internos.

A inovação passa a ser praticada através de uma grande rede colaborativa, com mentes criativas de dentro e de fora da organização.

Resumindo, a inovação aberta tem emergido como um modelo em que as empresas comercializam suas idéias/tecnologias tanto externas quanto internas e utilizam fontes de produção de conhecimento/tecnologias tanto internas quanto externas. A idéia central disseminada por Henry Chesbrough é que em um mundo de conhecimentos amplamente distribuídos, as empresas não deveriam dar-se ao luxo de confiar apenas em seu própria investigação interna, ao invés deveriam comprar ou licenciar os processos ou invenções de outras companhias. Além disso, as invenções internas invenções que não estejam sendo utilizadas no próprio negócio poderiam ser comercializadas externamente. A Prof. Isabel Ramos em uma palestra proferida na abertura da 1a. Semana Europeia de Inovação em PMEs, apresenta os principais conceitos associados a estratégia de inovação aberta e lista algumas hipóteses de aplicação da estratégia:

1. Acelerar a obtenção de receitas e lucros a partir de produtos e serviços de elevado valor para o mercado.

2. Facilitar a transformação do modelo de negócio para permitir a

comercialização de inovações.

3. Permitir o aproveitamento de “janelas de oportunidades

Crowdsourcing: Consumers as Creators (The ripple efect) - by Paul Boutin at Business Week Review

Crowdsourcing Innovation

A Living Lab is about experimentation and co-creation with real users in real life environments, where users together with researchers, firms and public institutions look together for new solutions, new products, new services or new business models.

Living Labs Minho (LLMinho) is an initiative led by University of Minho (through its School of Engineering and its research centres) that contributes to two goals defined by University of Minho: (1) to be recognized as an university without walls; (2) to lead Minho into a region of knowledge. The initiative fits in the realm of innovation, technology transfer and knowledge-driven regional development. Considering the global nature of knowledge-related matters, an international dimension is crucial to the success of LLMinho

But also Living Labs are about societal involvement, about promoting innovation in a societal basis, involving academia, SMEs, public institutions and large companies in an Open Innovation process that because happens in real environments has an immediate impact.

This is how Living Labs aim to contribute to a new Innovation System where users and citizens become active actors and not only passive receivers.

See more looking at The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) , a bottom up grown organization coming from the European Living Labs, the E.U., national and regional governments, academia and leading companies + SMEs, providing networking and a global context to its members.

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