Promoting Ecosystems and Regional Development – in support of Regional Operational Programming (PEARDROP)
The principal focus of PEARDROP is to make more accessible and more practicable for regional policy makers and key local actors the instruments for the exploitation and adoption of research results in ICT for Enterprise Networking and, in particular, in Digital Ecosystems.

This is necessary for a number of reasons:

• to date knowledge on the subject is very fragmented and needs to be professionally codified and disseminated to have maximum impact.
• Europe lags behind its international competitors - particularly the USA - in this field.
• the sector is critical to the successful promotion and development of the European Knowledge Economy.
• ICT for networked businesses, particularly SMEs, will be of critical importance in the creation of additional high added value employment opportunities in the future.

Whilst breaking important new ground, the concept of digital business ecosystems remains predominantly theoretical and its potential benefits are as yet not fully or widely appreciated. PEARDROP aims to draw together the most salient results of the digital business ecosystem cluster of FP6, converting these where necessary into ‘layman’s’ terms, as well as into a number of EU languages, with a view to making them more accessible and of more practicable use to regional policy makers, especially those concerned with regional operational programming and with eBusiness development. PEARDROP expects to increase significantly the number of regions that are informed about, actively participating in, and considering deployment of, digital business ecosystem research and models. In so doing, PEARDROP will contribute to the development and implementation of European digital business ecosystems research and, thereby, support implementation of the Framework Programme. Specifically, growth in the number of instances of European regional digital business ecosystems allows both for increased networking for businesses as well as for a larger and more representative sample in which to validate and adapt research efforts.

The transformative uses of ICT, contributing to the growth and competitiveness of enterprises, especially SMEs, is a fundamental premise of many EU, national and regional policies. In particular, ICTs are making possible new collaborative and networked forms of working that enable SME’s to adopt new processes, develop new products and services, and to reach new markets. ICT adoption can result, in some circumstances, in business transformation – but this is not universally the case.

PEARDROP will seek to better understand critical success factors in terms of the behaviour of regional development agents, and will propose systems (tools and methodologies) for assessing the risks and barriers, as well as the benefits and effectiveness, of such approaches and related policy interventions with a view to supporting regional policy makers and programmers in formulating more effective policies.

PEARDROP will investigate and contribute to five specific domains of digital business ecosystem research – namely:

• economic impact on, and regional development effects of, successful eAdoption by SMEs (socio-economic dimension);
• success factors for regional eBusiness adoption programmes and related barriers (socio-technical dimension);
• legal issues and challenges arising from collaborative models of working in the new economy (legal and administrative dimension)
• the underlying ecosystem infrastructure (communication networks and software infrastructures etc) and networking issues that form the environments of networked enterprises (technological dimension)
• financial engineering and programming perspectives (financial dimension).

PEARDROP will disseminate its results in an innovative manner to as wide an audience as possible across all member states.