Towards semantic collective awareness platforms for business innovation

Innovation represents the main driver for enterprises to evolve, and very often to survive in the globalized market. In the last decades, innovation in enterprise contexts has seen the introduction of new paradigms leveraging the so-called collective intelligence. Such paradigms have gained momentum thanks to the diffusion of the Internet, and the Web 2.0 in particular, and many supporting platforms have been developed. A critical aspect here regards the availability of tools able to manage the knowledge flow across the whole innovation lifecycle (problem awareness, idea generation, solution implementation), overcoming the fragmentation and heterogeneity of the informative resources of the involved players. With this respect, we propose a Semantics-based Collective Awareness Platform for supporting business innovation activities, in which semantic facilities are provided for a smarter knowledge acquisition and sharing, as well as for supporting solutions to complex problems. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.