This chapter presents the architecture of an intermediary platform for networked open innovation management, as well as a surrounding sustainable business ecosystem. The instantiation presented here is tailored towards SMEs, both as stakeholders in the platform and as contributors in the modular ecosystem. It enables SMEs to work together in creating innovative products, increasing both reach and agility of their innovation processes. The chapter also describes to some detail the technical realization of the system, including the representation and automatic acquisition of relevant information. Selected business aspects are also addressed. It specifically focuses on the role of ontologies and how they contribute to the overall business value of the system.
In today's globalized economy, innovations become more and more crucial for the success of enterprises on the global markets. This article presents a reference architecture for an intermediary platform-and surrounding ecosystem-supporting the Open Innovation process in a network of SMEs and related stakeholders. Its main aim is to foster stakeholder dialogue in networked innovation management, but it also offers technical measures for data acquisition. We demonstrate business viability of the platform based on an analysis of involved stakeholders and their requirements.
Qualitative research plays a vital role in political development and in the design of statutes and directives. Consequently, ensuring the quality of this research is important. However, the current literature on evaluation of quantitative and qualitative research does not reflect this importance, and we have identified a need to establish guidelines for evaluating qualitative research projects for quality. Therefore, and based on existing research, we have developed a framework for assessing the research quality of large complex projects using qualitative methods. In our study, as presented in this article, we operationalize and apply the framework to evaluate six specific methods in the large European research project, Secured Urban Transportation-A European Demonstration (SECUR-ED); each method is assessed according to the quality criteria of "transferability," "systematic design/reliability," and "transactional validity." Overall, we find that half of the SECUR-ED project methods demonstrate thorough documentation and transferability, and that half of the methods lack consistent usage and therefore score low on both reliability and validity. We also find that one method, the capacity mapping matrix, scores high on all quality parameters. Accordingly, we suggest that future European Union (EU) projects replicate the documentation efforts demonstrated in relation to several of the SECUR-ED methods, and consider the capacity mapping matrix as "best practice" standard. We conclude that the framework represents a novel approach to quality assessments of qualitative project methods across research topics and contexts.
Part 3: Decision Support Tools and SystemsInternational audienceIn the context of the CRISMA FP7 project we have developed a seamless decision support concept to connect simulated crisis scenarios and aggregated performance indicators of impact scenarios with state of the art Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods. To prove the practicality of the approach we have developed a decision support tool realising the important aspects of the method. The tool is a highly interactive and user-friendly decision support system (DSS) that effectively helps the decision maker and strategic planner to perform multi-criteria ranking of scenarios. The tool is based on state-of-the-art web technologies
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