Stiff Structures for Loose Folks – A Platform for an Open Innovation Community

The increasing opening of the innovation process fairly neglected an important group of potential innovators so far: the employees of a company. Their integration offers promising potentials, but also requires an adequate IT support. A virtual innovation community seems to be an adequate construct to funnel the employees’ creativity and knowledge into innovation management, but per se points out the need for structural support. For the implementation we used a social networking based innovation platform prototype, which aims to allow for the integration of all employees into the innovation process. Here, two options are shown to provide transparency and orientation within the innovation platform to the users as well as controlling mechanism to the innovation managers: First, the fundamental innovation structure, which allows for the flexible treatment of elements in the data model and their integrated display at the front end. Second, a semi-structured innovation process is shown, which allows for management and flexible customization.