Insights on the innovation hub's design and management

摘要

The paper affords the topic of the innovation hub as an enabler of connectivity to support organisations in the innovation process. Given its potentiality, the hub is a tool increasingly adopted by companies, science parks and local authorities to enhance informally communication, knowledge sharing and open collaboration for innovation. Starting from some successful examples of innovation hub, the research focuses on its design and management, highlighting some challenges to be faced by organisations that deliberately adopt this tool. The first challenge lies in the identification of the drivers and guidelines underlining the hub's design. The second challenge concerns the opportunity of extracting value from big data collected in the hub. The study highlights not only the importance of setting technological tools based on social media to exchange data at real-time but also the ability of the organisation to transform information into long-term competitive advantage through dynamic capability expressed in the form of listening, analysing and proactivity. The last challenge regards the way to unleash the innovative potential of participants by defining appropriate corporate policies that are based on technological tools, incentives and rewards and orchestrating mechanisms to coordinate the network of communities.