Boosting the Innovation Process in Collaborative Environments

In this paper we propose a new architecture and methodology to define a collaborative environment aimed at supporting the innovation process. In the first part of this paper we analyse the data collected during an experiment for testing a collaborative environment and, in the second part, we propose an architecture to support and stimulate innovation processes. Our solution is based on three components, namely a (i) collaborative platform, (ii) a tool able to extract knowledge from shared documents, external data sources, and collaborative activities, and (iii) a recommender system. More specifically, we focus on how knowledge items are extracted from incoming knowledge flows to be proposed to a team, whose members are capable of proposing values for design issues and/or evaluating these choices from her own specific perspective. Furthermore, the aim of the proposed framework is not limited to the selection of relevant knowledge but, more broadly, on aligning the team on a restricted set of information items, producing a convergence of objectives that accelerates the kinetics of the collaborative work.