EBEST · Empowering Business Ecosystems of Small Service Enterprises to Face the Economic Crisis

The eBEST project addresses small companies (typically with less than 50 employees) providing services to other businesses, often by subcontracting, in different industrial sectors. In general the intended service companies perform added-value activities in the intermediate phases of the value chain and/or in the repair and maintenance phases. The eBEST project strategic objective is to set-up, experiment and promote the adoption of new collaboration practices within each business ecosystem and across the ecosystem borders, taking advantage of a shared knowledge, an agreed corpus or rules and codes of practice, and a suite of ICT tools to support the intended ecosystem dynamics. The eBEST project operational objectives are: • Presenting worldwide the offers of the single service companies and clusters, and the integrated offer of the ecosystem as a whole, by exploiting sectoral and multilingual ontologies and taxonomies. • Adopting trust-building mechanisms, codes of practice, work assignment rules and performance evaluation criteria to guide the fair coopetition of the target companies. • Providing the target companies with easily accessible ICT applications and services to enable communication and collaboration within ecosystems and with the external world. • Experimenting and improving in real-life conditions the functional coverage and user acceptance of the proposed approach, methodology and ICT functions. • Deploying the project results to the largest audience so as to reach a critical mass of user companies in the shortest possible time after project completion. The economical situation calls for fast answers. For this reason the above challenging objectives should be reached in no more than two years. This is feasible since the RTD performers bring to the eBEST project a huge amount of background knowledge, in both organisational and technological terms, that was acquired by their participation in a number of recent European projects.