Open-Source Innovation In Practice: A Lean-Based Development Process Leveraging Open-Source Big Data Tools

Innovation depends on the exploitation of market potential with products that are aligned with customer needs. However, building innovative products is becoming gradually more challenging because of increased market volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. In our Innovation Lab, inside an e-Procurement Company, we encountered several challenges when implementing an innovation process to develop an initial unstructured data processing Minimum Viable Product (MVP) based on open-source big data tools: (i) raising and prioritizing user demands; (ii) deciding about adequate tools; and (iii) understanding how to promptly set up a viable product. In this paper, we share our open-source innovation experience in bringing novel solutions to an oil company's suppliers. In general, we present and discuss how we have been applying our innovation process to create MVPs, and which technical decision helped us accelerate the MVP development in the presence of a large-scale, unstructured database and open-source big data tools. Overall, we believe the proposed lean-based development process can help practitioners and researchers who;cant to understand and improve their knowledge about lean products, how to build MVPs, and advance open-source innovation involving big data tools.