Knowledge management is a crucial aspect for enterprises that want to effectively cope with business innovation. However, the full control of the knowledge asset is often missing due to the lack of precise organizational models, policies, and proper technologies, especially in Virtual Enterprises (VEs), which are characterized by heterogeneous partners with different policies, skills and know-how. For such reasons, the need for technologies that enable knowledge sharing, efficient access to knowledge resources, and interoperability is felt as primary. This work proposes a semantics-based infrastructure aimed at supporting effective knowledge management for business innovation in VEs. Knowledge resources are formally represented and stored in a semantic layer, which is exploited by a set of semantic services for enabling efficient retrieval and reasoning capabilities to derive additional knowledge.

As the importance of the service sector increases, so does the importance of systematic approaches to develop new services. Two key activities in service innovation are generation and evaluation of new service ideas. Exchanging and analysing ideas across different software tools and repositories is needed to implement the concepts of open innovation and holistic innovation management. In this paper, we introduce an ontology to represent ideas for service innovations. The Idea Ontology provides a common language to foster interoperability between tools and to support the idea life cycle. The paper focuses on how such an ontology-based approach can be used to facilitate innovation management in the service domain where special aspects of services impair innovation. The expected benefits of a semantic approach such as semantic reasoning and automatic analysis of ideas are highlighted. 1.

Abstract: Business process improvement, as an unavoidable component of the companies ’ strategy, particularly for SMEs, is deeply interwoven with innovation in general and both are conditio sine qua non for surviving and thriving in the global economy. This paper describes an approach and ICT system for supporting business process improve-ment following a structured way to innovation process management. The innovation process management approach based on agile principles in methodology and a corresponding ICT supporting solution is presented. Two application cases, one dealing with development and manufacturing of weighing systems against specs and regulations and one dealing with development and manufacturing of systems for Monitoring and Control of Assembly Processes in the manufacturing industry, where the system prototype was tested, are briefly described as well.