Generic Modular Ontology for Innovation Domain. A Key Pillar Towards “Innovation Interoperability”

In a century of complexity, organizations are moving towards open innovation. So, contemporary Innovation Management Systems have to deal with the distributed, heterogeneous and fast growing characteristics of knowledge that are available in different forms and are rather weakly structured. In addition, the increasing degree of specialization and interdependence between and among organizations calls for group capabilities at the organizational level to interoperate with others to produce not only novel, but also critically acclaimed innovations. This is the focus of this paper that introduces the new concept of “Innovation Interoperability”. Then, it formalizes and represents semantically the key concepts underlying a systematic innovation approach and the relations between them, through a Generic Modular Ontology, we have called “GenID Ontology”. The latter consists of three interconnected sub-ontologies, referring to the key dimensions of successful innovation within an open context, which are: Core-ideas, Actors and Context. This paper has adopted a mixed research strategy and uses a qualitative online survey to examine the delivered constructs.