SEARCHING FOR CONVERGENCE AND INNOVATION IN A COLLABORATIVE NETWORK

The convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science is transforming global society. Technological convergence is beginning to define the way societies interact themselves, the way science is done and the way the global marketplace is organized.
In middle 2006, Petrobras, a Brazilian oil company, established a pioneer multidisciplinary team of senior academics and end users working in partnership to find potential opportunities and benefits of technology convergence.
The objective of this paper is to present the methodology adopted by Petrobras, in e-science collaborative projects to generate ideas of new opportunities obtained by technology convergence for an energy company that searches solutions for the future.
The effort is based on contributions of a group of 50 senior scientists from top 5 brazilian research institutes working iteratively via the Web.
The convergence analysis is based on text mining developments, to process the abstracts of the selected papers to start the discussion and to analyze the comments in the knowledge fusion activity. It is completely integrated to the collaborative network environment.
Results of some convergence cycles are commented.