Accelerating web-entrepreneurship in local incubation environments

Abstract

This paper explores novel forms of technological and digital societal innovation putting the full potential of the Future of Internet into Web-based innovation, web-Entrepreneurship and Internationalization (IEI) of businesses. It introduces an approach to extend and complement existing incubation environments, which are no longer sufficient to deal with the dynamicity of the Web-Entrepreneur. Based on personal and professional relations, and new business models empowered by social media and the Web 2.0, together with a set of interoperable ICT services supporting virtual or agile enterprises, the authors propose a federation of open-source platforms for the to-be born and existing enterprise life-cycle management, instantiating the Unified Digital Enterprise concept. The novel approach ensures full reuse of existing solutions, developing targeted research to support web-entrepreneurship with cooperation between people, businesses, and assets, namely focusing on innovative methods and architectures for competitive intelligence; crowd-based market sensing; idea incubation and simulation; knowledge intensive team building; as well as interoperability to enable internal federation and external platform integration.