Sustainable development of regions in the global economy requires a systemic approach that combines available resources, skills and socio-economic interactions within a territory and that considers the participation of all regional actors in the social, cultural, economic and productive processes. By using this approach, regions are able to offer complex services, create new market opportunities, and facilitate the combination of knowledge, capabilities and resources among regional actors in order to jointly produce and offer new services and new products.
The European Commission within its 6th European R &D framework programme has demonstrated that ICT reveals to be the perfect instrument to support the creation of this kind of collaborative socio-economic environment that enhances productivity, competitiveness, innovation and knowledge transfer, through the Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) platform.
The digital ecosystems platform offers and transports services and information
(knowledge), through a technology that adapts easily to specific regional contexts.
It also can describe innovative business models and adapt to their changes.
In a digital ecosystem, every actor, small or large enterprise, public or private
body, make a simple profile description of its organization and the platform
is able to find the most efficient business links between them to increase
existent activities and to create new business possibilities. By doing so,
regions can integrate their actors into existent value chains and discover
potential new ones. Regional actors will be able to collaborate, interact and
build a community that shares business and allows knowledge transfer.
Under the European approach to digital ecosystems the exchanges and links are provided automatically by the peer-to-peer platform and not by a central server. The advantage of this approach is the creation of greater number of efficient and innovative results. This approach finds a perfect alignment with the philosophy of the Web2.0 social networking supported by the European Commission.
As the pilot projects successful results demonstrate, the ideal dimension for digital ecosystem deployment is the regional level enabled by a regional catalyser that proved to be useful during the first implementation phase. Also important at the regional level is the achievement of a critical mass of users that lets the digital ecosystems be more efficient.
The Regions for Digital Ecosystems Network (REDEN) reunites partner European regions with this common vision on sustainable regional development.
Thus, REDEN mission is:
| To promote the achievement of the Lisbon objectives through the digital ecosystems approach to sustainable regional development in order to achieve greater competitiveness of European regions in the global economy. |
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More precisely, REDEN objectives are to:
Thus, REDEN supports sustainable regional development by:
The following documents and web-pages present the major information resources related to the REDEN Network
The following web-pages present the major information resources related to the Digital Business Ecosystem concept and related activities. Since by definition, the topic is complex, evolving, and a variety of ecosystems exist, the following references may show a diversity of views and approaches, corresponding to the interests and background of the authors/groups.