Managing Service Innovations with an Idea Ontology

As the importance of the service sector increases, so does the importance of systematic approaches to develop new services. Two key activities in service innovation are generation and evaluation of new service ideas. Exchanging and analysing ideas across different software tools and re- positories is needed to implement the concepts of open innovation and ho- listic innovation management. In this paper, we introduce an ontology to represent ideas for service innovations. The Idea Ontology provides a common language to foster interoperability between tools and to support the idea life cycle. The paper focuses on how such an ontology-based ap- proach can be used to facilitate innovation management in the service domain where special aspects of services impair innovation. The expected benefits of a semantic approach such as semantic reasoning and auto- matic analysis of ideas are highlighted.