Inventorum — A recommendation system connecting business and academia

The aim of this study is to propose an information system that should help boost cooperation between business and academia and their innovativeness. Its novelty relies on introducing such a system architecture and business processes that allow implementing the paradigm of open innovation easily. More specifically, the proposed system: (i) automatically acquires data from the Internet and extracts information about innovations and innovative companies to attract more participants; (ii) matches businesses and scientists to enhance cooperation; (iii) recommends innovations, projects, and events that suit the best to criteria set by users. The usage statistics comprising the first year after the platform has been launched indicate that it seems to be a valuable step to increase a knowledge flow and build an innovative environment. It is available online on the Internet for free use.

I. Introduction

In the modern economy, we put much pressure on innovativeness to make our lives better as well as to earn more money by winning the business competition among countries or companies. According to Oslo Manual-Guidelines [11], innovation is something new or substantially enhanced in this way that it is useful for a customer or economically beneficial for a company implementing it. Innovations are categorised as a product, a process, or a marketing tool. Nowadays, we tend to substitute traditional titles like an engineer, a scientist, an inventor by one term an innovator [20] What is more, each employee may be an entrepreneurial unit inside a company, if it provides a proper working environment, for instance, it offers a flat organizational structure, one day a week for research or other activities, a program rewarding innovations [17].