Knowledge Economy in Software Engineering

In recent years, because of the competitive pressure, companies are encouraged to make frequent and continuous innovation of production processes and products. Consequently, there has been deploying the commonly call, knowledge society. This is characterized by an economy where the role of knowledge has taken on a dimension and a very different importance and far greater than that which has been in industrial society. This role is such that the economists now talk of Knowledge Economy (KE) and introduce awareness among the primary factors of production.
In knowledge society, the exchange of research results and innovations, among researchers, between companies and between companies and researchers, assumes a critical role according to the paradigm of Open Innovation (OI).
The Open Innovation paradigm marks the end of the twentieth century and is used as a strategy by large companies to mitigate research projects and related investments risks. In fact, research projects have two major risks: the predictability of time and the investment required to achieve the objectives.
With the Open Innovation Public or private organizations that have search results that can not use and develop immediately in their strategy make them available to exchange with other organizations.
When this exchange takes place, the knowledge producer organization has a return that reduces the cost of knowledge production investments, the user organization has availability on new research results to a defined cost. This paradigm is actually used only by large enterprises. This thesis and the research project that inspired the thesis intended to encourage the use of this paradigm for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
The Software Engineering (SE) is certainly an excellent field to test the effectiveness of knowledge transferring technologies and to implement them in SMEs. In fact, SE, having, is based on several human-centric processes; consequently the human knowledge is a critical resource that needs to be stored, exchanged in the way to became enterprise patrimony. Moreover the goal to support the competitiveness of enterprises through the software needs continuous and frequent innovation. Finally, it is necessary knowledge exchange among researchers and between researchers and professionals who work in software companies to realize technology transfer. Moreover knowledge economic perspective is relevant and is, in this area, a critical aspect. So, SE research allows growth and competence refining in KE.
This work is in the above-mentioned contest and aims to the definition, conceptual validation, experimental validation and verification of the effectiveness of a set of technologies for knowledge and experience acquisition, transfer and reuse in order to support Open Innovation. The proposed approach is based on the use of a Knowledge Experience Base (KEB) for knowledge and experience elicitation and transfer, an Experience Factory process to continually improve KEBs contents and a CRM for the KEBs monitoring and evolution.
The KE contests is explored in Chapter 2, the proposed issues will be introduced in Chapter 3, through the identification and description of some of the approaches and practices that are intended to promote the challenges posed by the problems identified in the previous chapter. Chapter 4 describes the proposed approach and in particular the developed KEB. A preliminary validation and application of tools is presented in Chapter 5. The work concludes with a discussion upon the results obtained and the identification of future developments.