Software is increasingly being used as an instrument for innovation in products. It is ascending the value chain of products and has become a major driver for innovation.

The goal of the ITEI project is the realisation of a “Cyber Space for Product Innovation and Innovative Software Development”. This Cyber Space should allow software intensive product builders to better manage their company-specific innovation strategies.

The project objectives are:

• To assist software intensive product builders in selecting and tailoring the most appropriate innovation strategy depending on their context. We envision an approach by which each organization can define or select a suitable strategy, considering parameters such as type of innovation, partnership models, product complexity, available expertise, degree of maturity …
• To assist software intensive product builders to better manage the execution of its innovation projects in a swiftly changing development environment, monitoring and updating the status and progress of the projects and obtaining the necessary and sufficient knowledge to enable quick response and decisión making concerning the projects’ performance and business goals.
• To assist builders to understand the new business opportunities offered by open innovation and Web 2.0 technologies for their products.
• To include appropriate facilities, support and tools for product innovation, innovative Project management and continuous improvement of the company-specific Cyber Rooms.
• To deploy an operational open innovation portal for Product Innovation and Innovative Software Development that survives the project duration of the ITEI project. This community will be used for dissemination towards the broader industry.

The hypothesis of this research is that a better integration of the four Ps (Product innovation, Project, Process and Performance), complemented with new emerging and promising innovation techniques (Web 2.0, Open Innovation, Communities …) will lead to more successful innovations in software intensive product development.

Special attention will be paid to incorporate the state of the art of innovative product development techniques, methods, approaches and Web 2.0 techniques in the product development life cycle of software intensive systems.

The ITEI project focuses on the strategic “innovation” axis of the ITEA2 scope, with the specific goals of overcoming the European paradox “great science and technology, but poor translation into products” and of accelerating innovative solutions.

The innovative approach of the ITEI project lies in the fact that the focus is not merely on extending the state of the art in software product development, but rather in researching solutions to assist companies in aspects of decision making (e.g. deciding what to select from the state of the art; decide how to combine and integrate methods, tools and techniques; …) and tailoring towards their specific context.