Development of Digital Business Ecosystems

Digital Business Ecosystems have been the subject of intense research and development effort under the 6th European Research Framework. By its nature much of the work has been theoretical but now applications have started to be deployed across Europe.

EMNET was involved in the 6th Framework program “Digital Business Ecosystem” and worked alongside the UK regional catalyst to engage businesses and the public sector with the tools and technology. For this work we received an award from the European Commission http://de-2007.eu/sme_awards.html .

The use of Digital Business Ecosystems addresses the Lisbon Agenda through the link with the Framework research programmes and as such is in line with the objectives of the European Commission. DBE technology is being considered for use in new specialist EU projects and networks as well as more mainstream EU program.

The UK Government also launched a DBE orientated technology program earlier this year and it is possible that additional domestic funding program will be made available.

Description of a Digital Business Ecosystem

A Digital Business Ecosystem is an Internet environment which enables communications and interaction between networks and clusters of businesses. The communications and interactions can happen on a number of different levels from enhancing internet visibility and providing the opportunity to present more detailed business information than is currently possible right through to flexible integration of IT systems in a supply chain network.  

In the same way that very significant advantages have been gained through digital photography, printing and word processing. Design digital business ecosystems will bring benefits through Digital Business to Business interactions and communication.

Elements of a Digital Business Ecosystem

We have worked on three main elements of the DBE:

• The Business Modelling Language (BML) that is used to profile the contents of the Ecosystem
• The Search and Discovery system that uses semantic search to find elements in the ecosystem
• The middleware that is used to connect elements of the ecosystem and enables them to interact

The focus of EMNET DBE activity is currently the use of the BML profiling and the Search and Discovery tools with some use of the middleware modules.

The rationale for this is to provide an easy and understandable point of entry for businesses and agencies which then provides the opportunity for later deployment of the power of services supported by the DBE middleware components.
Middleware components will be used but will be deployed for behind the scenes operations.

Relationship of DBE to Economic Development

The European Commission has recognised that DBE offers a wide range of opportunities for Economic Development and is supporting the establishment of a number of networking projects and supporting other projects which contain DBE technologies.

The EU has funded a support consultancy project through ERISA (ianis.net) and a comprehensive range of material is available at www.peardrop.eu

Benefits for Cluster development

The technology assists cluster development in the following ways:

• Improves development of strategies and action plan delivery
• Provides a mechanism for more effective intervention with individual companies
• Provides and evidential base for intervention
• Enables capacity matching between companies
• Establish the sector cluster managers as highly effective sector leaders
• Provides a platform for impact measurement
• Provides mechanisms to promote sector clusters online
• Provides a dynamic bench marking tool to guide company and sector development

The technology provides clusters with the following

• Unparalleled knowledge of the sector cluster  as a whole
• A detailed knowledge of individual companies including capacity, skills, markets, prices, portfolio
• Identification of skills gaps, market failure and under capacity in the sector
• Matching of possible partners across the cluster
• Integration with Customer Relationship Management systems to allow intervention tracking
• Comparison of company development over time
• An Internet based sector cluster specific search resource
• Analysis tools for business processes

 Benefits to businesses

• Improved Internet visibility
• Structured access to market places and aggregators such as Google Base and E-Bay
• Enhanced promotion of good and services and an opportunity to exhibit to a specialised audience
• Improved business to business communications through enhanced information
• Opportunities to collaborate more effectively on tenders and commercial pitches

New Opportunities and Developments

EMNET is now working with a number of clients and project partners to plan and deploy Digital Business Ecosystems in the UK and in Europe.

Please contact us if you are interested in working on Ecosystems at enquiries@emnet.co.uk