Proceedings of ERIMA07’ 15-16th March 2007, Biarritz, FRANCE ERIMA07’ Proceedings Fostering SMEs networking through Business Ecosystem and ICT G. Perrone 1, *, L. Scarpulla 1 , L. Cuccia 2 1 DTMPIG, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy 2 SEAF, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy * Corresponding author: gioperro@dtpm.unipa.it, +39 091 665 70 35 Abstract: Globalisation is a new challenge for European Small and Medium Enterprises; indeed, on the one hand it represents a threat, since new emerging companies are entering their domestic market, but, on the other hand, it represents the opportunity to enter new emerging and growing markets. In order to win this challenge European SMEs need to play the networking card; in fact, it is well acknowledged that networking can improve SMEs effectiveness and efficiency which is absolutely necessary to win the globalisation battle. Many public regional institutions are thinking about how to improve the networking capacity of their SMEs through specific programs and investments. This paper reports the results of an ongoing research project aiming at improving the networking capacity of SMEs through an innovative conception of the Business Ecosystem idea. The paper shows how the innovative Networking Business Ecosystem has been conceived and how it works for pursuing this aim. Keywords: SMEs networking, Business Ecosystems, Enterprise interoperability, Business Research for SMEs, Distributed ICT platforms I. Introduction From Powell’s seminal work (Powell, 1990), networked organisations have emerged as a new enterprise pattern able to better match the new competition arena requirements. From then on many papers have addressed hybrids from an economic point of view (Menard 2004), from an organisational point of view (Grandori and Soda, 1995), and from a performance point of view (Mazzarol, 1998). This last point is particularly interesting; indeed, an underlying assumption concerning networks is that hybrids are especially good for SMEs. In fact, through networks, SMEs are able to overcome some of the limitations due to their size (achieving scale and scope economies coming from resource pooling) by maintaining the advantages coming from being small (reactiveness, proactiveness and so forth). Recently, several papers have addressed the performance issue for SMEs networks indicating that networks are able to support long term growth for SMEs (Havnes and Senneseth 2001, C. Lin and J. Zhang 2005). These results have become so important that public policy in Europe is pushing SMEs in networks with specific programs. This is so true that firm networking is present in several work packages of the 7 th Framework Programme of the European Commission; specifically the Activity: 2.2 (Research for SME associations) aims at improving SMEs association (EU Commission 2007a), the objective NMP - 4.3.3 Networked Production (EU Commission 2007b) aims at developing research for networked production and the Objective ICT-2007-1.3: ICT in support of the networked enterprise (EU Commission 2007c) aims at developing new ICT tools for SMEs networking. This last point is particularly interesting for our purposes. Indeed, networking technologies promise new tools for improving business networking making collaboration and coordination easier. However, ICT can also improve the ability of SMEs to associate in networks. In that case ICT needs to encounter a business paradigm that facilitates SMEs association in networking along complementarities matching and business opportunities discovery; this paper goes toward this important direction. Indeed, it presents a novel methodology for improving SMEs networking not from a co-operation and operative point of view, where different ICT platforms have been