An Innovation Model for Collaborative Networks of SOA-Based Software Providers

Part 5: Service Orientation in Collaborative Networks

International audience

Software industry has become a very important sector, mostly comprising SMEs. New ICT paradigms have arisen to face new challenges of the economy, namely the Service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA has the potential to leverage SMEs to new degrees of competitiveness. One of the most relevant drivers for that is innovation. However, SMEs use to be very limited in their resources, and both innovation and SOA are complex, costly and risky. This paper presents preliminary results of an ongoing research towards developing an innovation model that relies on collaboration, enabling software/SOA providers to work as an open network and hence to jointly carry an innovation out. This is important as SOA/software/services sector is very different than manufacturing, to which most of the innovation models are devoted to. The proposed model also identifies the most relevant supporting issues that should be taken into account along the innovation and collaboration processes. The model is presented as well as its rationale. Final considerations about the work are presented at the end.