The FutureEnterprise project is an initiative spearheaded by the European Commission that aims to “open new avenues for Internet-based Enterprise innovation”, by coordinating research activities and innovations for the future internet from the perspective and for the benefit of european enterprises.
• Envisioning innovative research directions for the acceleration of new forms of Enterprises. With the active contribution of Contributors groups, FutureEnterprise will systematically explore enterprise-related trends, elaborate on visionary scenarios related to how enterprises, entrepreneurship and net innovation may evolve in 2050 and reach consensus on the challenges to be tackled by researchers and practitioners.
• Providing concrete policy recommendations toward Horizon 2020 and for Web Entrepreneurs.FutureEnterprise shall engage all stakeholders in open brainstorming exercises to identify opportunities, challenges, and bottlenecks that should be addressed in future EC programmes and activities.
• Fostering a novel innovation culture in research to serve entrepreneurship purposes by exploring and seeding new ideas and opportunities, as emerging from the research landscape, to enterprises at all stages of maturity (from entrepreneurs to established SMEs and enterprises).
• Defining a unique vision for the community fusing technology with business research and infusing a Web Entrepreneurship culture, the advancements of the Future Internet PPP and the repercussions of Collective Awareness Platforms (CAPS) into the enterprise context, evolving the FInES community.
• Bringing together a community targeting research to promote business transformation, development of new and enhanced product/service and support for new forms of enterprises.
• Increasing awareness and spreading knowledge.
Crowdsourced, iterative and live versions of a research roadmap on new forms of Internet-based Enterprise innovation will be delivered by the Digital Business Innovation community, with the support of the FutureEnterprise CSA project.
The roadmap is developed with the help of an open innovation approach that combines the collective intelligence of the community to investigate the state of play, build and explore scenarios for Enterprise2030 and eventually to identify concrete research challenges.
In comparison to past experience and previous roadmapping attempts, the novel characteristics of the roadmap entail: (a) the involvement of a Contributors group (including the FutureEnterprise Experts’ Panel and other affiliated experts and initiatives) to actively and collaboratively co-write the contents of the roadmap (instead of merely validating and commenting); (b) three crowdsourcing exercises to gather ideas for the state of the art, the visionary scenarios and new research areas through a well-established methodology; and (c) the reinforcement of the enterprise role by translating the contents of the roadmap (which is typically written from a rather scientific and research perspective) to the needs of enterprises through roadmap take-up activities.
