The Open Innovation Paradigm and the Semantic Web: an Ontology for Distributed Product Innovation Davor Meersman 1 and Tharam Dillon 1 1 Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute, Curtin University of Technology, De Laeter Way, Technology Park 4, 6102 Bentley, Australia {d.meersman, t.dillon}@curtin.edu.au Abstract. In this paper we introduce an ontology specifically designed for product innovation. We discuss the specifics and advantages of domain ontology construction for product innovation. We then look at the application of the framework to the scuba diving equipment manufacturing industry domain. Keywords: open innovation, product ontology, product innovation 1 Open Innovation and Heterogeneity The inherent inter-organisational nature of the open innovation paradigm [1] implies a versatility of participating agents and systems, heterogeneous information formats and differing semantics. The problem of product data integration has been addressed by the Semantic Web community by the development of product ontologies. The most important product ontologies today are eClassOWL [2], PRONTO [3], SWOP [4] and GoodRelations [5]. Properties such as product shape, material, colour, family and other manufacturing and sales related concepts are covered, in some ontologies to very great detail. However, in the context of open innovation the main shortcoming of these ontologies is that product, component and property functions are not included. Hence they are to be regarded more as very important and valuable assets in the modelling, manufacturing and commerce process, rather than tools to drive innovation. We would like to argue that for ontologies to be valuable in innovation processes, we need to rethink the entire idea of product ontology. 2 Product Innovation Ontology for Open Innovation A major conceptual component of our ontology is that product, component and property functions are integrated in a very granular product representation. Besides listing which products have which components and properties, we define which components, which sub-components and even which properties have a certain