The objective of this book has been that of providing the essence of the results of the European project BIVEE to a large audience. We hope that it will contribute to improving the innovation potential of the European SMEs and, more generally, to improving the awareness of all the people who contribute to any kind of innovation initiative. There is a growing understanding that innovation is one of the main factors that will guarantee for the European production system a solid way of regaining competitiveness against the most dynamic economies of the world, such as USA, China and India. And that innovation is able to guarantee a long-term economic success, rather than other forms of competitive strategies (e.g. the price war) that, if successful, may only bring a temporary, fragile competitive edge.

The book reported on the key points that have characterized the BIVEE project. Primarily, the idea is that innovation is essentially a knowledge-centered activity. In fact, when an enterprise starts an innovation venture, it needs a substantial set of preexisting competencies and a solid knowledge base, on which the challenging work of innovators needs to rely. Competences and knowledge should not be only on technologies and the specific application domain, but they need to span on a much larger territory. In fact, to achieve a successful innovation, it is necessary to cover and interconnect knowledge from many different domains: from enterprise organization to economics, from marketing to law. Thus, innovation requires us to produce additional knowledge, targeted to proceed toward a finding and solution that did not exist before. But, a knowledge-centric approach is also important for the optima management of an innovation project, from the initial formation of the consortium, to select a set of partners with complementary profiles, to the day-by-day monitoring and management of the activities, milestones and costs. The great variety of knowledge to be managed in an efficient and effective manner requires the adoption of advanced semantic technologies; this has been a strategic choice in implementing the BIVEE platform.

The second key point concerns the focus of the project on SMEs. SMEs represent 99% of European industries, but when talking about innovation they cover a minor fraction of the innovation projects carried out. This is due to a number of causes, among which the high fragmentation, difficulty in establishing a smooth information flow with the potential partners, scarce practice with digital technologies and in particular cooperation platforms and last but not least the lack of the critical mass. This point is clearly addressed in the book, where the illustrated solutions are conceived to be adopted by virtual enterprises, specifically networked SMEs, pushing on open collaborative innovation. Here, one of the key challenges has been the problem of the large variety of information systems and data management solutions (some of them as simple as an Excel file) used in the various SMEs. Here, the project concentrated on an effective solution of distributed data harvesting and semantic reconciliation.

Another key achievement of BIVEE has been the conception of a framework, the business innovation reference framework (BIRF), aiming at proposing an engineering approach to innovation capable of preserving, and even supporting, the creative thinking that is the basic fuel of innovation. The BIRF is founded on the BIVEE methodology that in turn is based on the idea of four innovation waves: creativity, feasibility, prototyping and engineering. The metaphor of the wave intends to convey the notion of a propulsive power, a loosely structured organization of the activities, including fuzzy boundaries between the different waves that follow one another, and the extreme flexibility of a liquid substance. All the rest of the BIRF rotates around the four BIVEE waves, such as the document templates (and the corresponding document ontology: DocOnto), the monitoring systems and, primarily, the idea of the virtual innovation factory (VIF). The latter exploits the knowledge-centered approach of BIVEE, where innovation is seen as a set of dynamically organized activities having the objective of producing an innovative solution in the form of a “knowledge artifact”. The production of this knowledge artifact is achieved by a knowledge factory, referred to as the VIF. A VIF is “virtual” for two main reasons, first since it has no predefined boundaries and organization, its components and the teams working for it will vary in time, depending on the specific wave, the addressed problems (sometimes unexpected), the available budget, the active “external” cooperation, etc. Thus, it is virtual in its final outcome: the “intangible” knowledge artifact. But, the overall production paradigm is similar to that of manufacturing production (but with a number of important differences): you start with an objective (but less clear), you acquire the necessary raw material (but of an intangible nature: the relevant preexisting knowledge), you refine the acquired material (filtering, selecting, connecting and organizing knowledge items), adding also new knowledge items, eventually producing the final knowledge artifact, ready to be transferred into production.

A vast literature clearly indicates that creative ideas represent only the spark that starts an innovation project. Thus, it is necessary to provide resources, to engage talented people, to spend time and money and to unleash enthusiasm. All those factors are mobilized in high-risk settings, where the probability of failure is lofty. For this reason, another key point is represented by a systematic and reliable monitoring framework, implemented by using a method and tool specifically conceived for the purpose. BIVEE monitoring framework is based on a system of key performance indicators (KPIs), carefully selected, but supported by an open tool that allows the users to selectively adopt them and specify additional, custom KPIs when needed. Also, here the knowledge-centric approach is highly valuable, since the KPI system is supported by a dedicated ontology: PKI-Onto.

As anticipated, innovation cannot be carried out in isolation with respect to the rest of the world: it requires a constant cross-boundaries knowledge flow. The start is characterized by the acquisition of a first base of knowledge that includes, besides the knowledge on the specific target (product, process, service, etc), knowledge on the business context, market, competitors, etc. But, the knowledge should flow in two directions, not only “outside-in”, with an intake flow, but also “inside-out”, accepting external contributions. The latter flow is essential to maintain a constant and fruitful knowledge exchange with partners, research centers, clients and stakeholders, who may be of great help in several phases (waves). Such an open innovation paradigm needs to be implemented with a great care of the protection of intellectual property. BIVEE has been well aware that overprotection risks isolating the innovation process in an ivory tower with reduced probability of success, but on the other hand, full transparency may expose leakages, jeopardizing the competitive edge that original solutions bring.

A fruitful information and knowledge flow must also be established with the production space that represents the final destination toward which the innovative solutions will be conveyed. BIVEE is well aware of this and another central part of the BIVEE framework is represented by the notion of value production space, i.e. the production context where the virtual enterprise operates, from which large part of the innovation demand comes and where the innovation solutions need to be implemented. Here lies another critical issue: the capacity of the production organization to adopt new solutions and implement the changes that the acquired innovation requires. The specific part connected to the change management has not been systematically addressed within the BIVEE project and is in our agenda for a future project.

In conclusion, we are convinced that innovation can no longer be treated as an empirical discipline, and there is a compelling necessity to progressively introduce an engineering approach: BIVEE demonstrated that this can be successfully achieved. In the future, we intend to address the four main issues that emerged during the project: (1) promote educational programs to progressively build a diffused culture of innovation and, more specifically, the special competencies indicated in this book, including the role of innovation manager (see the e-Leadership proposal of the European Competency Framework¹); (2) extend the BIVEE platform with the missing section necessary to guarantee a safe management of the open innovation approach by suitably protecting the intellectual properties; (3) systematically address the problems connected to the introduction of an innovation in a value production organization, i.e. a change management framework capable of supporting the introduction of innovations without reducing the production capability of the organization and; (4) but the very last point is the possibility of transforming the BIVEE prototype into a commercial, industrial strength product, and spread it among the European SMEs, to achieve the impact that the valuable outcome of BIVEE deserves.