Society and industry in particular increasingly rely on innovative designs for products and services. Innovation starts with the creativity of individuals; they collaborate in teams, exchange ideas and share knowledge, learning together, informally. Such innovators go through cycles in which new ideas are generated and explored, valued and detailed. But they need appropriate tools to generate ideas, reuse them, take them apart, criticise them, or even reject them.

The ultimate goal of the idSpace project was to build, in prototypical form, the idSpace environment that should come to the aid of distributed teams of innovators who want to collaborate on product design, thereby making use of earlier results by themselves or even others.

The idSpace environment

• Contains an integrated toolset which help to track and store semantic relationships among conceptual models, which is used to describe ideas, goals, features and values.
• Exhibits extensible, informal, pluggable pedagogical approaches, which drive specific uses of the platform.
• Instantiates a flexible, context aware, web-based platform, which forms the substrate for communities of practice to grow, thrive and learn