Documenting and assessing open innovation: co-creation of an open data model for surgical training

Abstract

Challenge competitions have recently resurged for promoting open innovation in areas where markets fail to provide incentives, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Challenges call for the general public to contribute novel solutions to a well-defined problem, in exchange for prizes, credentials and the promise of further development of selected solutions. The aim of this paper is to report on the development of an open and collaborative data model to document and evaluate innovations in the context of a challenge competition, while also being compatible with the work of other open source communities to validate and improve them. By reusing open documentation standards and embedding them into a semantic collaborative platform, the model aimed to be flexible enough to respond to the evaluation needs of the project organisers and self-assessment for participants. We expect our experience provides insights on the potential of semantic, collaborative platforms and standards for increasing the impact of innovations towards the SDGs.