Companies and research institutes are always threatened by rapid technological developments and corporate M&A. They are trying to secure a sustainable competitive advantage using outside knowledge and expertise under open innovation to overcome these shortcomings. As a quantitative and systematical method of selecting virtual team members for open innovation, we present a virtual team formation model and a prototype to verify its efficiency. The test scenario shows how to form a virtual team through internal and external human resources when developing a new product.
Over the past 10 years, emergence of the web has brought about significant changes in society, including the IT market. These changes are expected to become even more dramatic owing to the evolution of web technology. With the emergence of web 2.0, which is based on the values of participation, openness, and sharing, the IT market is interested in a user-based service paradigm. The corporate environment is changing to a flexible environment that utilizes the concept of participation, openness and sharing. The web is becoming a platform in which the user directly participates in services and produces new business models, which are often referred to as “next-generation web” or web 3.0. The semantic web is the concept that always comes up when the future of the constantly evolving web is mentioned, and many experts consider this as the keyword of the next-generation web (Berners-Lee, Handler, & Lassila, 2006).
Like the changes in the web environment, the knowledge network known as the open innovation strategy in the corporate management paradigm is becoming a key factor that enhances corporate competitiveness through open innovation. Connect & Development (C&D) is one of the open innovation models to acquire novel internal and external ideas. Professor Henry Chesbrough of U.C. Berkeley stated, “Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.” He added that “an open business model will bring innovation” (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke, & West, 2006).
Open innovation through the external knowledge network is in the spotlight because firms are limited in maintaining competitiveness alone by themselves due to increasingly faster technological developments and fiercer competition. Accordingly, companies must build a knowledge network to get new external ideas and supplement the limited internal competence. External knowledge that is needed to reinforce competitiveness and core internal knowledge must be effectively blended for integration of knowledge. With this goal, many companies are collaborating or jointly performing research, and this process has the characteristics of virtual organization (VO).
How to find the external knowledge and expertise required for building a knowledge network for a company to survive and how to form a team for a project are the issues that arise in a complex and dynamic management environment where there are many competitors and new technologies. In this study, the concept of virtual organization was used to discover project opportunities, and to present a model to form a virtual team to successfully carry out the project, the internal and external experts were evaluated quantitatively in terms of knowledge and collaboration under a semantic web environment.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 surveys literature related to the semantic web, virtual organization, assessment of a team, selection of team managers and team members, and social network. Section 3 presents a model for semantic web based virtual team formation (SVTF). Section 4 uses a prototype for testing the effectiveness and efficiency of the SVTF model, and Section 5 presents our conclusions.
We suggested a method of evaluating the internal and external persons’ knowledge from the viewpoint of Know-What + Know-How and Know-Who using the publications data of the semantic web, as well as the methods of selecting a virtual team manager and virtual team members for projects.
To execute virtual team formation for open innovation, a social network ontology model was built with OWL to gather publications data of internal and external persons from the semantic web. The knowledge and collaboration competence of internal and external persons were quantitatively evaluated to select the VT members who carry out the project using GA. The selected member with the highest knowledge and collaboration competence score was selected as the VT manager. Companies and research institutes that perform joint research or collaboration could quickly and effectively form VTs with the external experts using the quantitative method for enhancing project performance over the existing qualitative method.
