A Flexible Collaborative Innovation Model for SOA Services Providers

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural paradigm that has emerged to help facing new challenges in software development and integration. SOA projects use to be complex and costly. ICT companies are by far composed of SMEs (Small & Medium sized Enterprises), having many levels of limitations, hazarding their innovation capabilities and hence their long-term sustainability. This can be mitigated if they do innovation collaboratively, with other SMEs. This paper presents results of an innovation model devoted to leverage independent SMEs of SOA services providers to jointly develop a SOA product, sharing costs, risks and benefits. The model is very flexible so as to support the intrinsic uniqueness of an innovation process. The model is complemented with so-called functional guidelines, which help SMEs managers knowing what are the usually most important issues to handle along the different steps of an innovation. Results of its initial evaluation by end-users are presented. Final considerations are presented at the end.