The Innovation Engine for Team Building –

The EU Aristotele Approach From Open Innovation to the Innovation Factory

Ernesto Damiani – Paolo Ceravolo Università degli Studi di Milano

Innovation

Open Innovation

The ARISTOTELE Innovation Factory

Recommendation in Collaborative Environments

Lesson Learned

Future Works

Outline

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.

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.

Open Innovation

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)

ARISTOTELE Project

Supports addressing ill-defined, vague needs and

transforming them into requirements or virtual products

Suggestions are derived based on open-innovation-

sources like help desk messages

Reactive mode only (for now)

Innovation Factory

Innovation Factory

Innovation Factory

Innovation Factory

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 (1)

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 (2)

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

Methodologies to Foster the Innovation

Factories (3)

The outputs of the first stage of Innovation Factory

(Virtual Product Designer) can be used to generate VPs

Workflow (1)

Virtual Product

Designer

Recommender

System

Innovation

Support System Virtual

Product

Suggestions

Target: Working

Team

Configuration

Settings

Explicit Organization

Knowledge

External Stimuli

The VP definition, annotated with requirements and

requested competencies, is used as stimulus for the

Recommender System

Workflow (2)

Virtual Product

Designer

Recommender

System

Innovation

Support System Virtual

Product

Suggestions

Target: Working

Team

Configuration

Settings

Explicit Organization

Knowledge

External Stimuli

Last stage of the workflow (Innovation Support System)

gives suggestions to personal learning plans specific

for workers profiles and organization needs

Workflow (3)

Virtual Product

Designer

Recommender

System

Innovation

Support System Virtual

Product

Suggestions

Target: Working

Team

Configuration

Settings

Explicit Organization

Knowledge

External Stimuli

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 (1)

SM: guidelines on tech assistance

DM: entries from champion’s blog praising good

assistance

Entries about latest read of champion,

the book “Neuromancer”, is about

small communities taking over

Example (2)

SERENDIPITY!!

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

Experiment

Results: global activities performed

EX

Teams

EX

Teams

Results: global activities performed

CON

Teams

CON

Teams

Results: spec. activities performed

EX

Teams

EX

Teams

Results: spec. activities performed

CON

Teams

CON

Teams

Results: conversation actions

EX

Teams

EX

Teams

Results: conversation actions

CON

Teams

CON

Teams

Results: conversation flow

EX Teams EX Teams

Results: conversation flow

CON Teams CON Teams

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?

Experimental Results

RSs have reached in the last years a good level of ac-

curacy

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

Overspecialisation Problem

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

The mentor approach

Thank you

Any questions?

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