Innovation and Ontologies - Structuring the Early Stages of Innovation Management

3 Potential of Ontologies (S. 160-161)

The chapters on concept formation and ontology deployment have shown that ‘shared conceptualizations’ are powerful instruments supporting different applications. Closer examination makes two prominent objectives of ontologies apparent:

• The community of Artificial Intelligence researchers pursued a representation of a certain part of reality. To the business context, their efforts on enterprise ontologies and knowledge management by ontologies are particularly relevant. Application of these academically driven ontologies is estimated to be small.

• To management practice, establishment of a shared vocabulary for e-business stood in the focus of ontology development. These languages have been developed to enable exchange of company data and integration of supply chains. Application of these ontologies is high.

Both strands of research and practical use built on information which was available in a structured form. Taking product names (like in RosettaNet) as exemplary illustrations, an inherent structure is already existent which ‘only’ needed translation into a formal notion. Once translated and codified, the resulting ontologies functioned as knowledge bases for information representation and retrieval (AI context) and as shared interchange languages (business context). Considered to be merely instruments, little information on the potential of a shared interdisciplinary ontology development process or the possible support of ontologies for human communication were derived. Given this situation of successful deployment of representation and interchange ontologies, there is need for further research to explore the following aspects:

• Ontologies might be able to provide structure to poorly structured or unstructured information and knowledge, resulting in a flexible, i.e. easily adaptable framework.
• Such a structure could realize management support and interdisciplinary communication alignment, resulting in a lingua franca for the relevant part of reality.
• Analysis and comparison of particular ontologies established within the framework could be used to derive information beyond operational data, e.g. strategic implications. Thereby, ontologies could be of management support.

As the chapter on the Fuzzy Front End illustrated, the unstructured knowledge and the fuzzy processes during the early stages of the innovation process provide an interesting field to establish such an ontology. Furthermore, research interest in the particularities and needs of SME is little. I expect the ontological Fuzzy Front End Gates (OntoGate) to contribute to an improvement of problems by deploying previously unrealized potential:

• Potential concerning the Fuzzy Front End: The OntoGate establishes a flexible framework for the unstructured processes during the Fuzzy Front End which (a) can easily be specified, (b) is applicable for the management of incremental as well as radical innovations and (c) can be expanded, reduced, and adapted to fit diverse requirements (e.g. size of the company), resulting in the beginning of a lingua franca for the FFE. Besides, it provides a systematization of the status quo of the Fuzzy Front End in the empirical field. Comparison and analysis of different approaches is consequently possible, resulting in management support for the FFE. To sum up, the OntoGate is established to provide managerial support by establishment of an ontological approach to idea assessment in the early phases of the innovation process.

• Potential of the ontological approach: The OntoGate transfers a method of Information Science (focus on machine-readability) to managerial use (focus on human interaction). The approach itself provides a theoretically derived and empirically tested procedure of development.