Abstract:

The ARISTOTELE project starts from the fact that the wealth of European companies has progressively shifted from tangible assets (e.g. capital, resources) into intangible ones (e.g., knowledge, reputation, management skills, innovation processes, motivation, and attitude). In order to raise the competitiveness of European enterprises, it is extremely important to use information technology to support the provision of advanced solutions, finely tuned to the continuous change in competitive conditions in which organisations operate, capture and support intangible assets. Intangibles are closely related to human interactions being performed in day to day work. This is where ideas, innovation, learning, knowledge, relationships, social cohesion, and other diverse intangibles synergistically contribute to performance, competition differentiators and value creation.

Creativity and innovation inside organisations are directly related to the way people learn (informally and/or formally), collaborate, share ideas, knowledge, and organisational goals. Innovation may happen in several ways. For instance, the capability to relate events or domain knowledge to some other different domain problems and properly apply this may lead to innovative ideas.
Leading and innovative organisations typically have sophisticated innovation processes guiding their research and development activities. However, these processes rarely target the early phases of innovation and are usually limited to an organisational unit thus neglecting creativity as well as informal social networks outside the research and development area of an organisation. Enhancing the learning capability of an organisation is indeed a key element to achieve integration and merging of intangibles. But still today learning capabilities of an organisation are mainly devoted to allow acquisition of personal knowledge, skills and competencies that are very difficult to share with peers.

Current Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) solutions are centred on contents with very limited personalisation capabilities and then embed learning activities in the content itself. In the working environment, this type of rigid TEL solutions are integrated with the general enterprise learning objectives in a very simple (and often simplistic) way, e.g., through definition of pre-determined learning paths (courses) for classes of employees. Moreover, the adoption of Web 2.0 approaches emphasised the central role of the user and, more in general of user-generated contents.

ARISTOTELE will enhance learning and training of workers within their organisations by defining and developing models, methodologies, technologies and tools to support the emergence of competences and creativity by self-organised acquisition, processing and sharing of new information and knowledge with peers.

The five strategic objectives for the ARISTOTELE impact are:
• Learning and Training: Improvement of the learning and training processes tailored to knowledge workers' needs and expectations;
• Human Resource Management: Supporting Human Resource development, team formation, allocation, recruitment;
• Collaboration: Improvement of collaboration among workers using social approaches and sharing knowledge;
• Improvement of knowledge management practices
• Innovation: Fostering of innovation processes.

The presentation will outline the project and will report on the first piloting activities performed within two industrial partners.

Keywords:

Innovation, human resources, learning, training, web 2.0 platform.