Identification of innovation solvers in open innovation communities using swarm intelligence

Open innovation communities represent an effective strategy to provide organizations with a wider range of ideas, reducing the costs associated to R&D. Its main problem is the large volume of information generated in the form of proposed innovations that should be internally processed and executed by employed experts. The purpose of this work consists of identifying the profiles of the so-called innovation solvers using only their participation characteristics extracted from open innovation communities, which are modelled as social networks, and applying particle swarm optimization. Findings can improve the absorptive capacity of organizations by focusing on those users with more chances of generating potentially adoptable ideas.