-ec- - Technologies for Digital Ecosystems - -ec-
Supporting Regional Growth and Innovation
for Business Ecosystems

A sector within the Unit D5 "ICT for Enterprise Networking" of DG-INFSO

The Digital Business Ecosystem concept is emerging worldwide as an innovative approach to support the adoption and development of Information and Communication Technologies (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 ,which has recently been included in the i2010 local agendas.

Digital Ecosystem References

The concept is new and is rapidly evolving. The following pages list the major information resources and researches related to this concept. Since the concept is still new and evolving, the following references represent different facets of the concept. The diversity of views reflect the diversity of approaches, the main interest and background of the authors.

The public digital ecosystem website (here) is a partial mirror of this intranet website (i.e. the public website is purged by the confidential information and documents and with disclaimers)

Policy Objectives

ICTs play a key double role:

    1. ICT adoption plays a central role for improving productivity and for enabling business networking in a competitive knowledge-based economy. The wide availability of affordable ICT services and applications, which could be adapted to SMEs and local/national needs is crucial
    2. ICT development and service provision, preserving the existence of local ICT industry and related skills. In addition to the economic relevance of the ICT sector, it allows to keep independence and autonomy in this strategic sector.

The Digital Ecosystem aims at contributing to the achievement of the Lisbon objectives, providing SMEs, including micro enterprises, ICT applications and services which improve their efficiency, business integration and synergies within EU territories, but also enabling the integration of local value chains within the global market.
These applications and services are tailored on SMEs local needs and are formed by the dynamic integration of several components, which are provided by different organisations scattered around the Europe or the World. In this way the local ICT industries will maintain and enlarge its knowledge and capacity to develop and to deploy ICT applications and services.

Ecosystems

A digital ecosystem is a self-organising digital infrastructure aimed at creating a digital environment for networked organisations that supports the cooperation, the knowledge sharing, the development of open and adaptive technologies and evolutionary business models.

A digital ecosystem means to be the ICT-enabling technology for business ecosystems based on the dynamic and amorphous interaction amongs a multiplicity of small organisations. These new forms of dynamic business interactions and global co-operation among organisations and business communities, enabled by digital ecosystem technologies, are deemed to foster local economic growth.

A natural life ecosystem is defined as a biological community of interacting organisms plus their physical environment.

In the same way, a business ecosystem is "the network of buyers, suppliers and makers of related products or services” plus the socio-economic environment, including the institutional and regulatory framework.

The digital ecosystem approach transposes the concepts to the digital world, reproducing the desiderable mechanisms of natural ecosystems. As several interacting natural ecosystems exist, several digital ecosystems exists due to differentiation and the development of endemic product and services taylored to specific local needs.

The digital business ecosystem results from the combination of the open digital ecosystem infrastructure and the "population" of digital services and formalised knowledge. A network of digital ecosystems, composed by a digital ecosystem infrastructure, as common public resource, and its components, will offer opportunities of participation in the global economy to SMEs and to less developed or remote areas. It will preserve local knowledge, culture and identity and contribute to overcome the digital divide.

Specific Aims

The digital ecosystem research area aims at developing the ICT-enabling technologies and paradigms that are needed to support the emergence and sustainability of knowledge-based networked business ecosystems: geographical (or virtual) areas where specific policy initiatives will foster growth, improve innovation, productivity and social inclusion, through the optimal use of local assets and the global interaction empowered by ICT. The support to the knowledge sharing, the establishment of worldwide value chains and to transitory business networking promotes global cooperation and alternative ways of developing software and conducting business.

The key enabling technologies developed within the digital ecosystem research aim at providing a Technological Platform that supports the spontaneous composition, distribution, evolution and adaptation of ICT-based services. This platform should allow the SME software industry to independently develop - and disseminate on the network - services and software components, which will be composed forming complex, evolutive and adpted solutions. These technologies allow the spontaneous development and the cooperative provision of services and solutions, without the need of any keystone player, central coordination or central point of control/failure.

The digital ecosystems address in parallel the "ICT adoption" and "ICT development and service provision" issues, supporting:

    1. ICT users
      By activating the continuous creation and evolution of a multiplicity of affordable ICT-based services, digital ecosystems make available a diversity of services adapted to local needs, and lowering the barriers of ICT adoption for SMEs. This should allow SMEs to leverage the possibility of new distribution channels providing niche services at local ecosystems and extending their market reach through the DBE. In addition, easy access and large availability of applications adapted to local SMEs, will foster ICT adoption and local economical growth of innovation nodes.
    2. Software and ICT-based services providers
      By providing co-operative software development mechanisms for enterprises which are too small to alone produce a complete complex solution, digital ecosystems contribute preserving the strategic European software industry, and avoiding the loss of knowledge and human capital that would accrue from the dominance of few large players in a monopolists or oligopoly situations.

Research and Innovation Challenges

In order to realise the potential of the digital ecosystem vision, a multi-disciplinary approach will be adopted to specify, design and, implement the building blocks of a digital ecosystem infrastructure. The main scientific task is to translate the concept developed for interpreting social organisations and living organisms and converting them into a set of appropriate concepts and operative models for the development of the digital software ecosystems - targeted at small organisations.

Research should develop the basic theories and technologies needed for structuring and for the bottom-up spontaneous deployment and evolution of digital ecosystems. The transposition of behaviours and architectures from natural to digital and to economic systems requires to build new knowledge and the integration of R&D from several disciplines.

Taking a holistic approach, the DBE requires multidisciplinary fundamental research integrating the following main areas and their communities:

Recent Achievements

Science

The DBE Evolutionary Environment is currently in its implementation phase. A first release is expected in early 2006.

Computer Science

Architecture

October 2005 : DBE Studio: First open source public release of the first primordial open-source integrated developpment environment for the Digital Business Ecosystems

Alpha version of DBE Studio (based on OMG's MOF-compliant metamodel) has been released as Eclipse plug-in on Sourceforge, the code name is Merlin (Documentation ) ( Tutorial ). DBE Studio is an evolving collection of editors, tools and wizards that together will allow business services to be analysed, and corresponding software services to be defined, developed and deployed onto the DBE Execution Environment.

    • DBE Service Discovery and Ontology Analysis and Service Manifest Creator tools (Service composer, Recommender, DML editor, FDL editor, SDL compiler, ODM Editor, etc...)
    • Knowledge Base (in the future it will be distributed)

The release, install instructions, mailing lists and other resources are all accessible from the DBE Studio website on SourceForge. There are dedicated mailing lists for:

      • - developers of DBE Studio,
      • - users of DBE Studio,
      • - announcements relating to DBE Studio.

Additional Tutorials are at Open SOA

The DBE Execution Environment, has been released on open source, the code name in Swallow ( Documentation )

Formal Languages and Standards

SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules ) has been adopted by DBE as Business Modelling Language. In future evolutions a synergy with OMG's ODM approach will be implemented. The DBE goal is to enable small and medium sized enterprises to register their business and product offerings and conduct business over the Internet. SBVR is expected to allow SMEs to express their business in the natural language, making a significant contribution to the interaction capability of the digital ecosystems.

The OMG Business Enterprise Integration Domain Task Force and Architecture Board on September 12, 2005, approved SBVR to become a final adopted specification of the OMG.

First running prototype of the SBVR Editor for the Business Semantics of Business Rules (BSBR).

Community Building and Diffusion

The three initial pilot regions (Tampere, West Midland, Aragon) have lanunched the regional call for proposals for SMEs and open source developers, which will close end of November.

In October in the three regions will take place the "Code camps" for SMEs developers: the first real world test for DBE studio.

DBE is one of the projects selected to represent the IST projects at the WSIS exhibition in Tunis.

A new DBE website (finalised by the end of October) will act as portal towards digital ecosystem communities.

Legal Issues

Collection of legal issues and relevant recommendations related to digital ecosystem framework

Future Outlook

A first Conference presenting the Digital Ecosystem concept, organised by the DBE integrated project, will take place in 2006, whilst the European Commission will organise in September 2006 a Digital Ecosystem Conference.

The 5th IST-FP6 call for project proposal FP6-2002-IST-5 (closed on 22 September 2005),includes specific research and structuring activities on digital ecosystems (STREPs and NoEs). The text of the workprogramme includes the strategic objective "2.5.8 ICT for Networked Businesses" in the focus 1: "Digital ecosystems" addresses:

"Digital business ecosystems for SMEs. Research in this area will aim at providing an open-source environment and suitable operative models enabling small- and medium-sized organisations to co-operate, through... "

History

In September 2002 the e-Business Unit -SMEs area of the European Commission, DG-INFSO has published on the go-digital website (Background - Go-digital homepage) and widely disseminated the Discussion paper "Towards a network of digital business ecosystems fostering the local development"(.pdf).
During the fourth quarter of 2002, a sequence of workshops were organised to verify the interest of the European research community in investing in the Digital Ecosystem area. An additional objective of the workshops was to disseminate the information and to improve and enrich the digital ecosystem concept.

This concept was included in the FP6 IST work programme in the Strategic Objective 3.1.9 Networked Business and Government.

The April 2003 call for project proposal of the FP6-IST work programme included in its focus "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 objectives "3.1.9 Networked Business and Governments" .

Several research groups presented proposals for RTD projects proposals in the Digital Ecosystems area. A panel of independent experts evaluated these submitted proposals, and selected one large Integrated Project for funding under the available budget: DBE - Digital Business Ecosystems.
This first FP6 Project on Digital Ecosystems started its activities in November 2003 and will end in October 2006.

In April 2004 was created the sector "Technologies for Business Ecosystems", within the European Commission, as part of the Unit "ICT for Enterprise Networking" (DG-INFSO/D5) of the EC’s Information Society and Media Directorate-General; for further information about this sector you can address to the EC scientific officers: Francesco Nachira or Marion Le Louarn. In May 2004 the projects of the Unit "ICT for Business" has been grouped in 4 clusters; one of them being the cluster "Technologies for Digital Ecosystems".

During April / May 2005, a second cycle of workshops has been organised for re-tuning the research needs and the priorities in the digital ecosystems, producing a position paper which defines the context and set up a research agenda, you can find here the main papers about this reseach area, the past and future events, and the latest slides presented.

The digital ecosystems, although sharing some common protocols and enabling technologies are developed and grow independently at local level, implement policies of technological transfer and of innovation and contribute to build the European research Area. A growing number of innovative regions and areas are joining the initiative.

Go-digital: Home - SME Research - Background