OPAALS, DBE and Other relevant subjects!

The Digital Business Ecosystem concept emerged worldwide as an innovative approach to support the adoption and development of ICT. This concept, which has been coined initially in 2002 in Europe, aims at implementing the ambitious objectives set at Lisbon Council: higher growth, more and better jobs and greater social inclusion, keeping in mind the peculiarities of the European development, mostly based on a diffuse network of SMEs and local innovation systems.

Today, whilst even the most extensive centralised software environments have the ambition to form "Digital Ecosystems", the European vision of Digital Ecosystems is becoming mature. Following the pioneering work and the preliminary achievements, Europe is now developing a longer-term vision and an evolution strategy.
The Digital Business Ecosystem topic has been included in the FP7 Framework Programme, in i2010, in the i2010 local agendas.
but is not included in the topic of the the first two years of the ICT-FP7 implementation, described in the Workprogramme 2007-2008.
The Workprogramme 2009-2010 will be started to be drafted in the second half of 2007.

DBE Documentation

• The DBE Project: an Introduction: Paolo Dini, Andrea Nicolai DBE - The Digital Business Ecosystem (an introduction)
• The DBE Project: The Science Vision: Chapter 3.1 of the Addendum to DBE Description of Work (second phase workplan)

• The DBE Project websites are: www.digital-ecosystem.org (website) ; www.digital-ecosystem.net (collabnet)

• CORDIS Fact Sheet - e-mail for information : info dbe.digital-ecosystem.org

Abstract

The project DBE is one of the four Integrated Project selected for funding as result of the call for project proposal FP6-2002-IST-1 under the FP6-IST workprogramme in the area of e-Business. DBE project has started November 2003, the initial duration is 3 years and will be co-funded for this initial period with 10'500'000 € from European Commission.

This is the first FP6 project which addresses "IST as driver for small business and government reorganisation through local development processes including small business ecosystems" and "multidisciplinary researches into complex adaptive and self-organising systems" within the strategic objective : 3.1.9 Networked Business and Governments" .

The two overarching objectives of the DBE project are to provide Europe with a recognised advantage in innovative software application development by its small and medium-sized enterprises (software producer SMEs) and to achieve greater information and communication technology (ICT) adoption by SMEs in general.

The DBE will achieve these objectives by adopting a multi-disciplinary approach based on biology, physics, business and social sciences mechanisms and models to develop an open-source distributed environment that can support the spontaneous evolution and composition of software services (with multiple licensing, revenue and business models, i.e. not necessarily open-source), components, and applications. DBE transposes mechanisms from living organisms like evolution, adaptation, autonomy, viability, introspection, knowledge sharing, and self-organisation, to arrive at novel architectures and technologies, business processes, and knowledge, thus creating a network of digital business ecosystems for SMEs and software providers to improve their value networks and foster local economic development.

Four areas of research encompassed by the DBE project are:

1. ICT transfer and adoption, training, ethnography, etc.;
2. business modelling;
3. computer Science, Software Engineering and enabling technologies (web services, software agents, distributed architectures, ontologies, etc); and
4. fundamental models (Maths, Physics, Biology, AI).

One of the outputs of the project is an opensource, component-based software infrastructure that will act as a commons to support the evolutionary optimisation of software services for SMEs. This digital infrastructure will fit the local cultural identities and socio-economic needs of SMEs to support their participation in regional and sectorial innovation clusters. The DBE will change the way SMEs and EU software providers use and distribute their products and services. It will allow SMEs to link enterprise-wide external resources and value networks, and to allocate them based on their business goals and priorities.

The DBE is based on the key finding that with such an evolutionary and self-organising system Europe could harness the complexity of software production and its SME software industry could regain competitiveness in the market, developing and customising software components produced by Smes at local level and fitting with the local identity. The availability of software solutions and services adapted to local needs (i.e. SMEs needs), should improve the ICT adoption from SMEs and improving their way of doing business and productivity.

Labels: DBE abstract

// posted by Lost in the crowd! @ 12:32