NextHub: AI-Enhanced Open Innovation Platform for Strategic Scouting and Business Analytics

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Research on technological infrastructures supporting open innovation ecosystems is evolving toward data-centric paradigms enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Nevertheless, key limitations concern the continued reliance on syntactic rule-based search for matching corporate initiatives with innovative solutions and the difficulty of integrating advanced AI capabilities into cloud-native architectures supporting end-to-end scouting workflows. This paper introduces NextHub, an AI-enhanced open innovation platform designed to support strategic technology scouting and data-driven business innovation. The system integrates semantic matchmaking, collaborative project management, and advanced analytics within a cloud-native architecture. A hybrid recommendation engine combines multilingual transformer embeddings, structured attributes, and supervised score refinement based on expert feedback to align corporate initiatives with relevant innovative solutions. Empirical validation demonstrates robust platform performance and recommendation accuracy. Cross-language analysis confirms high semantic consistency across multilingual datasets. A real-world case study on a space-technology scouting campaign illustrates the platform’s effectiveness in accelerating discovery and strengthening collaboration between corporations and startups. The results highlight NextHub’s contribution to scalable, explainable, and traceable innovation management within digital ecosystems.