 Chapter II Interoperability Concept Supporting Network Innovation Jari Tammela Spiral Business Services Oy, Finland Vesa Salminen Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland Copyright © 2008, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. absTraCT Innovation capability in creating new offering and new business models by distributed communities is becoming more important. Competitive advantage can be achieved by knowledge communities. Increasing share of the innovation process is taking place outside the company. This is due to increasing complexity of products and services containing multiple technologies that are not developed inside the company. Also shortened product life cycle and time to market force companies to focus on their key technologies and looking for partners to cover the supporting technologies. This interdependency organizes companies to the networks where innovation capability success is emerging property of the network. This chapter is focusing on interoperability and providing a concept in order to speed up common innovation of the products and services in open semantic infrastructure. This includes identifcation of solution bound- aries and innovation partners. Operative challenge is how to decompose the requirements across the boundaries of different companies in different branches and in different role in the value and innovation network. There is also challenge on how to manage evolving technologies to satisfy customers’ existing and future expectations. inTroduCTion Knowledge intensive business is in continuous co-evolution. Nowadays competitive advantage can be achieved by open innovation in knowledge communities. Increasing share of the innovation process is taking place outside the company. In the global scale the information is available any- where when there is internet connection available. The community shares the same information at the same time. The question is how to integrate and synchronize knowledge, technology, compe- tences, and processes, especially when making something new.