A WEB PLAFORM FOR INNOVATION PROCESS
FACILITATION
Marie-Hélène Abel and Adeline Leblanc
HEUDIASYC CNRS UMR 6599, Université de Technologie de Compiègne
BP 20529, 60205 Compiègne Cedex, France
Keywords: Innovation Facilitation, Organizational learning, Learning Organizational Memory.
Abstract: Innovation is the prerequisite of knowledge creation and the essence of knowledge management. It has
become a crucial factor in company performance and survival. It can be seen as a process and not only as a
result. As a result, innovation is relative to the company’s capabilities to learn – way, from which new
knowledge can be developed, distributed and used. As a process, it concerns the design of products or new
services. It concerns also the emergence, the circulation and the achievement of new ideas. It is located at
the core of a progressive collective learning which needs old experiences voluntary capitalization. Finally,
we consider it as a complex process which reifies mainly three intertwined sub processes: A social process,
an organizational learning process and a knowledge management process. The main link between these sub
processes is organizational knowledge. In this paper we present these three sub processes and put forward
their needs of a dedicated computarized support which allows organizational knowledge sharing. Then we
specify how we took them into account in the framework of the project MEMORAe2.0 to design a web
platform fostering innovation process.
1 INTRODUCTION
Innovation is the prerequisite of knowledge creation
and the essence of knowledge management. It has
become a crucial factor in company performance
and survival. It can be seen as a process and not only
as a result. This process concerns the design of
products or new services. It concerns also the
emergence, the circulation and the achievement of
new ideas.
As a result, innovation is relative to the
company’s capabilities to learn – way, from which
new knowledge can be developed, distributed and
used (Sinkula, 1997).
As a process, innovation concerns people and
organizations which identity problems and select,
integrate and augment information to create
understandings and answers (Teece, 2004). It is
located at the core of a progressive collective
learning which needs old experiences voluntary
capitalization. Thus the most important resources of
the innovation process are tacit knowledge,
understanding and learning. In this sense, it is a
complex process which reifies mainly three
intertwined sub processes:
 A social process involving diverse actors who
requires support of collaboration that allows a
rich expression and discussion of
ideas/proposals under specific problem
contexts.
 An organizational learning process which can
be seen as a collective capability based on
experiential and cognitive processes and
involving knowledge acquisition, knowledge
sharing and knowledge utilization (Zhang,
2007).
 A knowledge management process. Indeed,
innovation needs an efficient storage and
retrieval of codified knowledge produced
during discussion.
The main link between these three sub processes
is organizational knowledge. In the following we are
interested in these sub processes in an innovation
process context. In section 1 we explain the role
played by communities of practice in the social
process. In section 2 we specify the organizational
learning process. In section 3 we present the concept
of organizational memory or corporate memory
which facilitates the organization’s knowledge
141
Abel M. and Leblanc A. (2009).
A WEB PLAFORM FOR INNOVATION PROCESS FACILITATION.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing, pages 141-146
DOI: 10.5220/0002292901410146
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

management process. For each of these processes we
put forward needs of dedicated computerized
supports. Finally, before to conclude, we present in
section 4 the project MEMORAe2.0 and the built
platform. This last one was designated in taking into
account the three processes above.
2 SOCIAL PROCESS
A social process is a process involved in the
formation of groups of persons. It is a way that
information coming from individuals or people
groups surrounding us affects our thoughts, our
actions and our feelings.
A way to favour such a process is to allow social
networks establishment. A social network is in a
way a community of practices. According to
(Wenger, 2008), when we speak about practice, it is
always question of a social practice. That’s why he
defines communities of practice as groups of people
who engage in a process of collective learning. This
learning can be the objective of the community
members or is the results of their interactions. They
provided a new approach, which focused on people
and on the social structures that enable them to learn
with and from each other. Because they offer
informal training situations, organizations have
interested in this approach for few years. Wenger
explains this interest by different reasons:
 Communities of practice enable members to
take collective responsibility for managing the
knowledge they need.
 Communities among members create a direct
link between learning and performance.
 Members can address the tacit and dynamic
aspects of knowledge creation and sharing, as
well as the more explicit aspects.
 Communities are not limited by formal
structures: they create connections among
people across organizational and geographic
boundaries.
Acting as a community of practice seems a
prerequisite to an organization to enable its members
to share experiences, knowledge and competencies
i.e. to learn each other.
Let’s note that in their study (Correira, 2007)
recommend “organizations promote the role of
Virtual Community of Practice as sources of
innovation which create competitive advantage by
developing a culture where knowledge sharing and
reuse of information is recognised and valued.”
According to (Dubé, 2006), Virtual Communities of
Practice, without excluding face-to-face meetings,
rely on Information Communication Technologies to
connect their members. Web 2.0 technologies
facilitate the creation of social networks and thus
these Virtual Communities of Practice.
3 ORGANIZATIONAL
LEARNING PROCESS
The role of organizational learning for company’s
survival and performance has been described in
(Argyris, 1996)(Senge, 1990). Organizational
learning is the process by which organizations learn.
Thus a learning organization is an organization in
which processes are imbedded in the organizational
culture that allows and encourages learning at the
individual, group and organizational level (Sunassee,
2004). A learning organization must be skilled at
creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and
at modifying its behaviour to reflect knew
knowledge and insights (Garvin, 1996). Thus it can
be considered as a constellation of interconnected
communities of practice which deal with specific
aspects of the company's competencies (Wenger,
1998). Knowledge is created, shared, organized,
revised, and passed on within and among these
communities.
Finally, organizational learning seldom occurs
without access to organizational knowledge. In
contrast to individual knowledge, organizational
knowledge must be communicable, consensual, and
integrated (Duncan, 1979). According to (Chen,
2003), being communicable means the knowledge
must be explicitly represented in an easily
distributed and understandable form. The consensus
requirement stipulates that organizational knowledge
is considered valid and useful by all members.
Integrated knowledge is the requirement of a
consistent, accessible, well-maintained
organizational memory. Such a memory could serve
as support for communities of practice. In his
reflection about communities of practice
development, Wenger specified that “organizations
must to build organizational and technological
infrastructures that do not dismiss or impede the
organizational learning process, but rather recognize,
support, and leverage it” (Wenger, 1998). According
to him, communities of practice structure an
organization's learning potential into two ways:
through the knowledge they develop and through
interactions.
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4 ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY
The capacity of a company to develop an internal
knowledge base and to exploit external knowledge is
crucial for supporting an innovation process
(Hamdouch, 2008). Indeed, such a base is
constituted of the set of information and knowledge
produced, acquired and combined by company
members in order to innovate. It represents the
company “knowledge capital” (Laperche, 2007).
According to (Stein, 1995), an organizational
memory is defined as “the means by which
knowledge from the past is brought to bear on
present activities and may result in higher or lower
levels of organizational effectiveness”. It can be
regarded as the explicit and persistent representation
knowledge and information in an organization, in
order to facilitate their access and their re-use by the
adequate members of the organization for their tasks
(Dieng, 1998). Thus, an organizational memory
seems indispensable to collect the company
“knowledge capital” and then to foster
organizational learning. An integrated organizational
memory provides a mechanism for compatible
knowledge representation, as well as a common
interface for sharing knowledge, resources and
competencies.
Organizational memory can be made of both
hard data such as reports, articles but also soft
information such as tacit knowledge, experiences,
critical incidents, and details about strategic
decisions. We need ways to store and retrieve both
kind of information. Indeed, ideas generated by
employees in the course of their task seldom get
shared beyond a small group of people or team
members. This informal knowledge or non canonical
practice is the key to organizational learning
(Brown, 1991). New collaborative technologies
should be designed based on this informal
knowledge, or communities of practice. The use of
information systems to manage organizational
memory improves precision, recalling,
completeness, accuracy, feedback, and reviewing,
far better than the human beings currently involved
in organizational memory.
However, although they are essential
components in most organizational settings they are
not efficient for effective knowledge sharing (Gold,
2001). Web 2.0 technologies offer interaction
possibilities that contribute to stimulate innovation
process, reactivity and agility. In a learning
organization context, they allow to:
 Identify individual profile as resource;
 Perform information in a logic flow that could
evolve;
 Favour conversation;
 Give an easy access to information;
 Create a learning ecosystem;
 Capitalize any information to contribute to an
organizational memory.
In order to facilitate information retrieval, it is
useful to associate web semantic approach to web
2.0 technologies. In the context of the Semantic
Web, data on the web are published in machine-
readable format using shared ontologies to give them
a formal semantic, and inter-linked on a massive
scale. Thus data can be retrieval easily.
Thus designing a computarized organizational
memory linking web 2.0 and semantic web
modelling should better support sharing knowledge.
5 THE PROJECT MEMORAe2.0
One of the main reasons that communities are
considered as an important vehicle for innovation
process is their potential to create an environment
where members feel comfortable for sharing ideas
(Wenger, 1998).
In the framework of the project MEMORAe2.0,
we associated knowledge engineering model,
semantic web approach and web 2.0 technologies to
build the E-MEMORAe2.0 learning collaborative
platform as support for community of practice. With
such a platform, we took into account social,
organizational learning and knowledge management
processes (Leblanc, 2007). It is based on a Learning
Organizational Memory model. Thus, extending the
definition given by (Dieng, 1998), we propose the
concept of Learning Organizational Memory for
which users’ task is learning.
In order to assess our approach, we chose to
build Learning Organizational Memory for
academics organization. This choice of applications
is justified by two observations:
 A course is made of actors (learners,
instructors, trainers, course designers,
administrators, etc.), resources of different
types (definitions, exercises, etc.), written in
various forms (books, reports, etc.) and on
various supports (paper, video, audio, etc.). In
this sense, a course is an organization.
 Learner which have a course must get ready to
their professional life and thus with an
organizational learning.
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Let us specify that in the context of an
organization of academic type, organizational
knowledge is knowledge teachers want to transmit
and learners must assimilate. The actors of such an
organization must thus be able to exchange about
this knowledge.
Examples of this article come from the course
about applied mathematics at the University of
Picardy.
The project MEMORAe2.0 is an extension of the
project MEMORAe (Abel, 2006). Within the project
MEMORAe, we were interested in the knowledge
capitalization in the context of organizations and
more precisely the capitalization of the resources
related to this knowledge. We particularly focused
on the way organization actors could use this
capitalization to get new knowledge. To that end, we
developed the platform E-MEMORAe as support for
e-learning. In such a platform resources are indexed
to knowledge organized by means of ontologies.
“Provided with an ontology meeting needs of a
particular community of practice, knowledge
management tools can arrange knowledge assets into
the predefined conceptual classes of the ontology,
allowing more natural and intuitive access to
knowledge” (Davies, 2003).
Thus ontology provides a means for sharing
knowledge (Chandrasekaran, 1998).
We used Topic Maps (XTM, 2001) as a
representation formalism facilitating navigation and
access to the resources. Thus ontology structure is
used to navigate among the concepts as in a
roadmap. The user has to reach resources that are
appropriate for him. In such a platform, the general
principle is to propose to the users at each step,
either precise information, resources on what they
are searching for, or links allowing them to continue
their navigation through the memory. To be more
precise, the user interface proposes:
 Entry points enabling to start the navigation
with a given topic: an entry point provides a
direct access to a topic defined by an ontology
concept of the memory and consequently to
the part of the memory dedicated to topics.
 A short definition of the current topic: it
enables the learner to get a preview of the
concept and enables him to decide if he has to
work it or not.
 A part of the ontology describing the current
topic is displayed at the screen centre.
 A list of resources which contents are related to
the current topic: they are ordered by type
(books, course notes, sites, examples,
comments, etc.). Starting from a topic, an
entry point or a topic reached by the mean of
the navigation, the user can directly access to
indexed resources. Descriptions of these
resources help the user to choose among them.
 Navigation history: it enables the learner to
remind and to be aware of the path he
followed before. Thus, he can get back to a
previously reached topic if he wants to.
E-MEMORAe was positively evaluated in
academic contexts (Abel & al, 2006).
Within the project MEMORAe2.0 we are
interested in developing memory collaborative
functionalities and social processes. To that end, we
take into account:
 Different levels of memory;
 Different ways based on semantic web 2.0 tools
to facilitate exchanges and communication
between the organizational actors.
Thus in such an environment, we distinguish
knowledge and resources of:
 The whole organization;
 A group of individuals in the organization – the
organization is constituted of different groups
of individuals even if it can be seen as a group
itself;
 An individual.
To that end, we modelled different level of
memories.
In order to facilitate the externalization and
capitalization of tacit knowledge we modelled a
semantic forum.
Our semantic forum is an internet forum that has
an underlying model of the knowledge described in
its content. Such content is formed by users’
questions and answers about specific topics
concerning the forum themes. All the questions and
their answers are microcontents that we can
described by the author, the date of posting but also
by the theme and the topic it is about. In our context,
in order to not be disconnected with the innovation
process, topics are defined by ontology concepts. All
this knowledge is defined semantically although
users don’t aware of this definition and language
used to do it.
The idea is to foster and capitalize exchanges
concerning any topics of the organization defined by
ontologies. Microcontents are considered as micro
resources and indexed and reached like any
resources in the memory.
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Figure 1: E-MEMORAe2.0 navigation interface (in French).
In order to put into practice our modelling we
developed a new environment called E-
MEMORAe2.0 (cf. Figure 1). It re-uses general
principles of E-MEMORAe and gives the possibility
of learners to have a private space and participate to
share spaces according to their rights. All these
spaces (memories) share the same ontologies but
store different resources and different entry points.
Resource transfers can be done following two
mainly ways:
 Users can visualize different spaces/memories
content at the same time and make a drag and
drop to transfer a resource from a specific
memory to another one.
 Users can interact about specific topic via
exchange resources. We developed semantic
forum to foster tacit knowledge
externalization. We developed in the same
way semantic e-mails, semantic chat.
Semantic agendas are under construction.
In such a way, each group memory has its own
forum organized around the shared ontology. Each
interaction is automatically indexed without users do
anything. All the forum contributions are distributed
in the resources space among the other resources.
Users don’t access to the forum itself but to the
memory resources space and then select resources of
Forum type to participate to the forum.
6 CONCLUSIONS
Innovation can be seen as a collective process. It
implies individuals who may belong to multiple
communities. Companies have thus to facilitate the
emergence of innovation at individual or group
level. Indeed, implementation of interactive groups
aims at integrating specialized individuals with
complementary skills into supple structures in order
to foster creativity (Hamdouch, 2008). Communities
enable to convert their members’ tacit knowledge
into codified knowledge, making it more easily
available to support exchanges, learning and
facilitate innovation.
Thus the most important resources of innovation
process are tacit knowledge, understanding and
learning. In this sense it is a complex process which
mainly reifies three intertwined sub-processes:
social, organizational and knowledge management.
In this paper we presented these three sub
processes and how they are linked in an innovation
process context. Each of these processes can be
supported by a computerized platform; although
these platforms can support parts of innovation
process, designing a unique platform taking into
account the three sub-processes requirements should
foster it. That is why we defined the concept of
learning organizational memory and designed a
platform based on this model, semantic web
approach and web 2.0 technologies.
A WEB PLAFORM FOR INNOVATION PROCESS FACILITATION
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Currently our platform is used by academics
(organizational learning and social processes). We
have also contacts with industrials in order to
evaluate such an environment to foster innovation in
their organization.
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