Abstract
Product differentiation and the ability to compete in today’s demanding markets are biggest drivers of innovation. Innovation can be seen as new knowledge incorporated into products and services and in the process of new knowledge creation, organizations may not be autonomous. To overcome this issue, organizations opened their innovation processes aiming to acquire external knowledge by collaborating with several socio-economic agents (clients, partners, suppliers, universities, etc.). Several strategies and Web 2.0 based software tools were developed or adopted, aiming to include these agents in the initial stage of the innovation process. However, these tools may not be very effective in knowledge systematization – a mandatory requirement to facilitate knowledge transfer and internalization. This paper presents a method for the systematization of knowledge co-created in the process of new concepts development, in the context of user innovation. The method builds on extended conceptual maps collaboratively created and structured following the standard XTM.

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The Web is rapidly becoming the prime medium for human socialization. As it evolves towards an information-centric operation, it records everything and forgets nothing, assuming that every online resource disclosed by people (photos, posts, multimedia files, etc.) is permanently valid and is to be stored forever. However, throughout their lives, people tend to change, both in their habits as well as in their views and opinions. In many situations, as the years go by, information released loses relevance or people may decide they no longer want others to access information they have previously published. The work presented in this paper strives for a new information persistence paradigm, whereby the enforcement of "digital forgetting" is implemented over an information-centric model for the Internet. The defined solution enables the definitive elimination of digital objects, either on-demand or on a pre-scheduled basis, and, hence, their "forgetting." The solution, conceived within the framework of the European project CONVERGENCE, is based on the employment of metadata descriptions about resources, which unambiguously identify their rightful owners. This additional data is efficiently bound to the resource through the use of an extended version of the MPEG-21 Digital Item specification, and its prescriptions are enforced by CONVERGENCE's distributed provisions.

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The onset of the global crisis has emphasised the persistence of substantial differences in development and social progress within the euro area. The specific case of countries located in the southern periphery region has come to the centre stage, due to the harsh economic conditions that all these countries have experienced in the recent past. In the aftermath of the American subprime creditbubble, these countries’ high indebtedness raised doubts as to their ability to sustain publicfinances, with the financial crisis developing and gaining momentum due to the fragilities presentedin the economy. To varying degrees of severity, all of these economies have since been forced to introduce strong fiscal tightening pogrammes in order to achieve fiscal consolidation, which have translated into recession and rising unemployment. This book undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the causes of the crisis in southern European countries, showing that the ‘Achilles heel’ of these economies is rooted in the dismal evolution of productivity and in a specialisation pattern excessively based on the so-called ‘traditional’, low and low-medium tech industries, which yield low margins, declining export shares and, ultimately, withering international competitiveness. Such evidence suggests that the southern European periphery industrial growth model has reached itslimits, demanding a multidimensional policy approach capable of overcoming the magnitude and complexity of the present crisis. Without denying the need to adjust public and private balance sheets, it is argued that finding a sustainable path out of the present problems requires addressing the challenges of productivity growth and competitiveness in the long term. © 2014 selection and editorial material, Aurora A.C. Teixeira, Ester G. Silva and Ricardo Paes Mamede; individual chapters, the contributors