Social Networks and Information Systems to Handle Emergency and Reconstruction in Natural Disasters: the L\u27Aquila Earthquake Case Study

After the earthquake of 6 April 2009, the citizens of L\u27Aquila and the near provinces suffer many discomforts due to difficulties of collecting information they need to come back to a normal life. Most buildings in municipality and province have been damaged or fell down so it\u27s difficult to collect information from this structures. In this paper we discuss about the social and organizational needs of the L\u27Aquila citizens after the earthquake. We describe how an information system can help population to have an active part in reconstruction process supporting the development of a innovative social network. Furthermore this system acting at a social level can help the population to recover the shock caused by the loss of civil infrastructures and productive fabric, and to retie the broken social and productive links according with the sensemaking approach

IT Spin-Offs into the European Research Framework: An Innovative Configuration

In the current context, characterized by a sort of ‘open innovation’, spin-offs phenomenon represents an innovative approach to support technological knowledge transfer and innovation processes from research organizations to industrial world. Furthermore, spin-offs could be considered an innovative strategy to follow up the results obtained within collaborative R&D (Research and Development) projects. In view of these phenomena, this paper analyzes IT spin-offs created by European cooperative research projects, as an innovative strategy to follow up research outcomes. After providing a classification of the different spin-off configurations, the paper designs an innovative inter-organizational configuration of spin-offs coming from research activities. The LD-CAST case study, concerning an European research co-operative project in the fields of egovernment and transnational knowledge, close the work showing how the spin-off strategy may be used to exploit innovative interoperable e-business services

VirtuE: Virtual Enterprises for Information Markets\u27

An essential part of a modern economy is an information market. In this market, information products are being traded in countless ways. Information is bought, modified, integrated, incorporated into other products and then sold again. Usually, the manufacturing of an information product requires the collaboration of several participants. A virtual enterprise is a community of business entities that collaborate on the manufacturing of new products. This collaboration is often ad hoc, for a specific product only, after which the virtual enterprise may dismantle. The virtual enterprise paradigm is particularly appealing for modeling collaborations for manufacturing information products, and in this paper we present a new model, called VirtuE, for modeling such activities

How Innovative are Virtual Enterprises?

The virtual enterprise is usually cited as an innovative inter-organizational configuration. Is it possible to justify and to assert the innovativeness of virtual enterprises just by claiming that they are made up of innovative “elements”? Is a sum of innovative features making the resulting system innovative too? This contribution will investigate the conditions and the situations in which a virtual enterprise can be regarded as innovative from an organizational point of view. In addition, a comparison with other inter-firm cooperation configurations (e.g. extended enterprise, digital districts, inter-organizational projects) will point out the most innovative features characterizing the virtual enterprise

Supply Chain and Virtual Enterprises: the Beer Game evolution

Our aim is to create a simulation based on the rules of the Beer Game which includes the variables of a virtual enterprise, VirtuE in particular, and risk management, in order to understand the strategies underlying the subjects behavior in the face of risk within a means-end chain. This study shows the tests carried out on the original game, the variables that we proposed and the simulation results

Analysing Business Models for Cross Border E-Services Provided by the Chambers of Commerce

The term "Business Model" started to gain momentum in the early rise of the new economy and it is currently used both in business practice and scientific research. Under a general point of view BMs are considered as a contact point among technology, organization and strategy used to describe how an organization gets value from technology and uses it as a source of competitive advantage. Recent contributions suggest to use ontologies to define a shareable conceptualization of BM. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of BM Ontologies as a conceptual tool for the cooperation of subjects interested in achieving a common goal and operating in complex and innovative environments. This is the case for example of those contexts characterized by the deployment of e-services from multiple service providers in cross border environments. Through an extensive literature review on BM we selected the most suitable conceptual tool and studied its application to the LD-CAST project during a participatory action research activity in order to analyse the BM design process of a new organisation based on the cooperation of service providers (the Chambers of Commerce from Italy, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria) with different needs, legal constraints and cultural background.The term "Business Model" started to gain momentum in the early rise of the new economy and it is currently used both in business practice and scientific research. Under a general point of view BMs are considered as a contact point among technology, organization and strategy used to describe how an organization gets value from technology and uses it as a source of competitive advantage. Recent contributions suggest to use ontologies to define a shareable conceptualization of BM. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of BM Ontologies as a conceptual tool for the cooperation of subjects interested in achieving a common goal and operating in complex and innovative environments. This is the case for example of those contexts characterized by the deployment of e-services from multiple service providers in cross border environments. Through an extensive literature review on BM we selected the most suitable conceptual tool and studied its application to the LD-CAST project during a participatory action research activity in order to analyse the BM design process of a new organisation based on the cooperation of service providers (the Chambers of Commerce from Italy, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria) with different needs, legal constraints and cultural background.Uninvited Submission