An agorà for collective innovation: designing a dynamic web-based platform for communities

Achieving successful, repeated organizational innovation is a never ending primary challenge for companies. But often this cannot be pursued in a standalone modality. New practices are emerging to foster innovation, by building networks for collaboration and leveraging networks of outsiders. The paper empirically investigates the state of the art of open innovation web-based platforms (OIWP) through a classification of more than 200 OIWP based on nine variables. The aim is to offer a framework to position the different platforms, investigating the trends and evolving paths. The research suggests that the evolution of OIWP is going towards a more structured collective approach to favor cross-fertilization and technology transfer among companies, where the main roots to feed an innovation ecosystem based on web platforms are even more the concepts of communities and cognitive diversity, self-organization, ecosystem and shared fate. Finally, we present the concept, design and undergoing development of an OIWP named iCommunity, based on these concepts and projected to increase the innovation landscape of European SMEs and SMEAGs.