Process for Measuring and Visualizing an Open Innovation Platform

Open innovation breaks the traditional pattern for developing new innovation leading to new business and the activities toward it. Consequently, new requirements are posed to innovation measurement. Demola is an open innovation platform that takes real-life problems from companies and other organizations and puts together and facilitates projects where students from different universities come together to solve the problems. This paper describes a set of network visualizations and animations that were developed in co-creation with the Demola operators to make visible the activity that Demola has initiated. Moreover, the development process used to design the visualizations and the technical process that was applied are described and discussed. We claim that static network visualizations and animations of an open innovation platform development are useful in presenting, describing, marketing and selling the platform for existing and new stakeholders. Our experience shows that in order to develop visualizations and animations that meet the requirements set by the different stakeholders, an iterative and incremental development process is needed. Moreover, we claim that taking a data-driven approach to visualization development is a key enabler in supporting the development.