Open Innovation is defined as “the use of ideas and market knowledge – both internal and externals – to develop innovations” (CEN/TS 16655-5:2014) and it is based on this premise: “Valuable ideas can come from inside or outside the company and can go to market from inside or outside the company as well.”  Open Innovation has resulted in a set of collaborative tools to help involved agents develop networks where they can share ideas, exchange knowledge and propose new challenges and relies in what are called technology e-brokers or innovation markets like InnoCentive, NineSigma, Quirky, unseraller.de, TopCoder or Yet2.com.

These tools consist of web-based platforms where companies can publish innovation challenges and other agents can analyze and propose potential solutions. They are used to capture external knowledge and to assemble it with the company’s internal knowledge base, acting as intermediaries where innovation-involved agents can establish links and start collaboration activities.

Although these collaborative innovation platforms or markets are extremely useful, their functionality could be improved with the help of knowledge organization system and terminology tools. The use of terminology tools to standardize these descriptions contributes to the localization of experts in specific areas. When posting a challenge, authors can make use of closed list of terms to ensure the accuracy of the content. The demonstrator has been built with terms and descriptors from the National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) with the aim of showing the potential benefits of this approach and its technical feasibility.

As a conclusion, it can be stated that terminology tools help improve the access to data about partners, their skills and competences in complex information ecosystems that support Open Innovation processes and strategies.