Digital Ecosystems: The Next Frontier for SMEs and European Local Regional Clusters

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Digital EcosystemsThe Next Frontier for SMEs
and European Local Regional Clusters?
Krakow, 2-4 June 2005
EISCO 2005i2010 (eEurope) New Horizons, New
Tasks for Local and Regional Governments
Gérald Santucci European Commission DG
Information Society and Media Head of Unit ICT
for Enterprise Networking
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Towards a Global Dynamic Competition

• More interrelations
• More specialised resources
• More RD / innovation
• Accessing to global value chain
• Accessing to knowledge

How to reach the critical mass of resources?
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Different Views to Ecosystem Metaphor

• Biological Ecosystem
• Tightly knit into a global continuum of energy
  and nutrients and organisms the biosphere.
• Dynamic, constantly remaking themselves, reacting
  to natural disturbances and to the competition
  among and between species.
• Industrial Ecosystem
• Frosch and Gallopoulos, 1989
• To bring the principles of sustainable
  development into all kinds of industrial
  operations.
• Economy as an Ecosystem
• Rothschild, 1990.
• The basic mechanisms of economic change are
  remarkably similar with those found in nature
  main difference is speed.
• Organisms and organisations are nodes in
  networks of relationships.
• Social Ecosystem
• Mitleton-Kelly, 2003.
• Organisations are co-evolving within a social
  ecosystem.

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Business Ecosystem

• J.F. Moore, 1993 1996
• Customers, lead producers, competitors, other
  stakeholders.
• The keystone species influence the
  co-evolutionary processes.
• Interaction (within a business ecosystem)
  decentralised decision-making and
  self-organisation.
• Core capabilities are exploited to produce the
  core product.
• M. Iansiti and R. Levien, 2004
• A large number of loosely interconnected
  participants who depend on each other for their
  mutual effectiveness and survival.
• Fragmentation, interconnectedness, co-operation,
  competition.
• Three critical success factors Productivity
  Robustness Nice creation.
• Four different roles Keystones Niche players
  Dominators Hub landlords.
• T. Power and G. Jerjian, 2001
• A system of websites (organisms) occupying the
  World Wide Web (habitat), together with those
  aspects of the real world with which they
  interact.
• Becoming a networked business changing
  everything that the company does.
• Four stakeholders communities of shareholders
  employees businesses customers.

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Inter-organisational and Collective Strategies
in SMEs

• Astley Fombrun, 1983
• Collective strategy is a systematic response by
  a set of organisations that collaborate in order
  to absorb the variation present in their
  environment
• Gueguen Pellegrin-Boucher, 2004
• Dialectics of competition strategies vs.
  co-operation strategies
• Co-evolution more co-operation yet maintaining a
  high level of competition
• Co-operation and competition are embedded in the
  culture of business ecosystems

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A New Concept to Understand Todays Business
Collective Strategies
Complex interactions
D E E P E N I N G
Business ecosystems
Game theory Multipoint/multi-market competition
Simple interactions
Pure perfect competition Homogeneous actors
Imperfect competition Heterogeneous actors
ENLARGEMENT
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Increased complexity in Business Networking
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Digital Ecosystem the Vision

• An approach promoted by DG INFSO-D/5
• A digital environment populated by digital
  species
• software components, applications, services,
  knowledge, business models, training modules,
  contractual frameworks, laws, etc.
• The environment enables species to behave like
  species in the natural world
• Interact
• Express an independent behaviour
• Evolve or become extinct following laws of
  market selection

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Digital Ecosystem the Strategy

A commercial environmentwhere s/w developers,
service providers and service users can
tradeprofitably and competitively on a new
Common Land
Derivative work from P.Dini - London School of
Economics
Economic growth in the knowledge based economy
requires a broad deployment and use of ICT by
enterprises and public institutions
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The Key Actors SMEs

• 19 million enterprises in Europe
• 99.7 are SMEs, 93 are micro (lt 10
• employees)
• ICT skills usually from outsiders
• Providing SMEs with customised ICT applications
  services for improving their efficiency
  (through process and organisational integration)
  and for extending their business beyond local
  barriers

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The Key Actors ICT-related Organisations

• System integrators
• Service providers
• Software component developers
• Open source communities
• Open systems developers
• Enabling these organisations to keep and
  preserve their knowledge and the possibility to
  develop/integrate ICT-based applications

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The Key Actors Regions

• From traditional rural economy to e-economy
• Connectivity ? high-speed fibre-optic telecom
  network wireless in areas where cable is
  uneconomic
• Digital literacy ? ICT-enabled social and
  entrepreneurial activities
• Promoting regional economic growth,
  competitiveness and employment
• Rejuvenating industrial areas through adoption of
  distributed, networked and open systems
• Networking of SMEs and experimenting with new
  services and new business models
• Synergies with the Structural Funds

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Digital Ecosystem and Regions
Support of regional research-driven
clusters associating universities, research
centres, enterprises and regional authorities
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Digital Ecosystem the General Architecture
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Looking Ahead

• IST-FP6 Call 5 ICT for Networked Businesses
• Digital business ecosystems for SMEs
• Open-source distributed self-adaptive environment
  and models enabling SMEs to co-operate for
  design, development of flexible and adaptable
  components interoperable with proprietary systems
• Support of spontaneous composition, sharing
  distribution of business solutions and knowledge
• IST in FP7
• Technology Pillar Software, Grids, security and
  dependability
• Application Pole ICT supporting business and
  industry
• New forms of dynamic networked co-operative
  business processes, digital ecosystems
• i2010
• Take-up of ICT ? an integrated policy on
  e-business giving special attention to SMEs

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i2010 What is different from eEurope?

• Convincing evidence of the positive effects of
  ICT
• e.g. SMEs to take up ICT, and more investment in
  RD
• ICT world is more mature and global gt from a
  pilot phase to wide deployment
• Covers the whole chain of EU Information Society
  and Media policies
• Regulation, research and deployment
• Emphasis on convergence, networking, content,
  public services and quality of life
• New ways to implement

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Conclusions

• The business environment tends to become truly
  knowledge-centric instead of document-centric
• Clustering/networking of SMEs, CRM and SCM
  solutions
• Business performance of SMEs throughout lifecycle
• Effecting collaborative content/knowledge
  creation
• Increasing the effectiveness of SMEs valuable
  business asset knowledge
• Digital Business Ecosystem to become the
  Internets new Common Land
• Knowledge is a good augmented by its use and
  consumption
• Like the Internet itself, no one owns or controls
  knowledge
• The open road to the Lisbon goals through i2010

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Thank you!