Skills and wills: the keys to identify the right team in collaborative innovation platforms

Abstract

The access to external expertise and collaboration initiatives became an undeniable strategy for highly innovative sectors. Innovation intermediaries have gained a prominent role in this scenario, and crowdsourcing platforms reached notable results. However, identifying right competencies with demanded innovation is a critical issue. Research is needed in the domain of matchmaking mechanisms for identifying the necessary skills to fulfil different kinds of problems in order to build effective collaborative teams. This paper investigates different approaches adopted in crowdsourcing and main characteristics of teams operating in these contexts. Thus, a set of critical issues is highlighted and a structured team-building methodology for finding suitable solvers in crowdsourcing challenges is presented. Such method is grounded on natural language processing (NLP) and semantic ontologies fulfilling some of the identified criticalities. The description is supported by a case study conducted within a self-developed crowdsourcing platform.

Keywords:

• collaborative innovation
• crowdsourcing
• team building
• competencies management
• matchmaking

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Mr Stefano Paganucci, Eng. Andrea Cappalunga, and Mr Marco Mura for their inputs and helpful advices.This work was supported by Regione Toscana Project ‘LILIT’ [PAR FAS REGIONE TOSCANA Linea di Azione 1.1.a.3] and MISE Project ‘IOTPrise’ [Bando RIDITT, DM 22/12/2009].

Notes on contributors

Gabriele Montelisciani is a Ph.D. student at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ and research assistant at the University of Pisa. His research interests are: innovation, crowdsourcing, sustainability, and business development. Dr Donata Gabelloni received the Ph.D. in Management Engineering. She has a research position at the University of Pisa. She is currently working on new product and process design methodologies and crowdsourcing.

Giacomo Tazzini received the M.Sc. in management engineering. His research interests are in the fields of crowdsourcing and innovation management. Dr Gualtiero Fantoni received the Ph.D. in Robotics, Automation and Bioengineering. Assistant Professor at the University of Pisa, his main interests are: micromanipulation, microassembly, design methods, and natural language processing algorithms.

Notes

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