The innovation capability of SMEs…

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. (http://www.kmowl.org/recent)

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.
Hakikur (http://www.kmowl.org/hakik/) is a pos-PhD researched advised by prof Isabel Ramos that is research about knowledge management and innovation for SMEs.
also advised by Prof Isabel, Cândida Elisa a PhD Student is researching about knowledge repositories for crowdsourcing innovation (https://sites.google.com/site/candidaelisasilva/Home).
“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 Pestana Mourão, another PhD Student (https://sites.google.com/site/organizationalmemory/Home) 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 own PhD research(http://sites.google.com/site/crowdsourcingandriskmanagement/) 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.

best regards,
Lieda Amaral

Prof. PhD Isabel Ramos (UMINHO) 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!