In the early stages of collaboration, matching the right skills to the right problem is essential. However, in today’s rapidly changing innovation eco-systems identifying, qualifying and negotiating Open Innovation partnerships in a timely manner has proved problematic for SME’s.
OPENiSME is testing and further developing a platform to support companies in finding and contacting expert skilled on a very specific topic, in order to enable SMEs to access their knowledge to innovate products or processes. This often allows to reach quickly the solution of the “innovation problem” since the expert, given his/her experience in the field, does not have to start from scratch.
The Open Innovation platform detects and ranks experts according to their Internet footprints and allows seamless connectivity between a problem owner and relevant experts. It searches “Big Data”, 100 million+ published papers, patent databases and Social Networks (e.g. Mendeley) to identify experts and institutions, so that it becomes feasible to contact them on a particular problem.
OPENISME will support SME’s in reaching strategic decisions in the context of high risk by linking them to appropriate sources of external data, expertise and insight to resolve or reduce uncertainties that relate to:
- Known Knowns – through the verification of FACTS (that may be wrong) which can be checked against external data
- Known Unknowns – through QUESTIONING via purposeful setting and testing of hypotheses
- Unknown Knowns – through the formalisation of INTUITION to transform tacit knowledge into forms that can be shared and disseminated.
- Unknown Unknowns – through EXPLORATION in collaborative research that generates new knowledge