Publications

The systematic support of the innovations process in small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) is still a challenge because innovation is only done sporadically and often with external consultancy in order to gain sustainable competitive advantages. This paper describes a methodology to cover the conceptual development of new products, which is typically structured into a number of specific steps and introduces an IT- tool that provides the transition from isolated tool support towards an information management along all the phases of the conceptual development in an innovation process. The application of the method in a use case is explained as well.

This paper presents the platform targeted in the PROGRESS-IT project. It represents an Enterprise Semantic Search engine tailored for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises to retrieve information about Projects, Grants, Patents or Scientific Papers. The proposed solution improves the usability and quality of standard search engines through Distributional models of Lexical Semantics. The quality of the Keyword Search has been improved with Query Suggestion, Expansion and Result Re-Ranking. Moreover, the interaction with the system has been specialized for the analysts by defining a set of Dashboards designed to enable richer queries avoiding the complexity of their definition. […]

Innovation-related Enterprise Semantic Search: the INSEARCH experience

Innovation is a crucial process for enterprises and pushes for strict requirements towards semantic technologies. Large scale and timely search processes on the Web are here often involved in different business analytics tasks. In the European project INSEARCH, an advanced information retrieval system has been developed integrating robust semantic technologies and industry-standard software architectures for Web monitoring and alerting, proactive search and personalized domain-specific classification and ranking functionalities.

The support of knowledge intensive tasks is a major concern of the research area of process oriented knowledge management. An interesting aspect is the support of weakly structured business processes with IT-tools. This contribution describes a software approach that combines the advantages of search engines that are accessible on the Internet and from professional information providers with a flexible organisation system for documents and conceptual structures (referred to as knowledge items) obtained from the research in a specific application domain. […]

Manufacturing SMEs need to innovate to keep their competitiveness on the market. In spite of this widely recognised need, few tools and methodologies are available to support SMEs in the innovation process, in particular during the definition of the concept idea. This paper describes how the technology innovation needs of SMEs could be supported by external consultants making use of structured methodologies, the Open Innovation approach and IT tools. A use case validating the proposed process is then reported.