Application of process mining techniques for innovation analysis and support

Innovation processes can be defined as sets of goal-driven activities, deeply influenced by human experience and behavior. With respect to traditional, structured operational processes, they present an high degree of uncertainty and heterogeneity with little or no structure. As a consequence, traditional business intelligence tools are mostly not suitable for innovation processes. Although the innovation promotion has become one of the hottest topic in business economy in last decades and its importance in organization growth is widely recognized, currently there are not proposal in Literature for the automatic analysis of innovation activities performed by an organization. Our research is hence aimed to investigate such activities and their corresponding innovation processes, by taking into account the way in which they are really performed in organization daily job. In the present work we briefly sketch the main issues related to innovation activities and their automatic support, firstly considering the current state of the art in Literature and then describing the main ideas of our proposal.