Swarm-Based Coordination of Business Networks: An Approach for Collaborative Value Creation of Innovative Goods and Services

The evolution of collaborative behavior within the World Wide Web (WWW) offers a high potential for new business models. Today, this potential cannot be exploited in all aspects, because the basic principles and mechanisms behind the behavior are still unclear. In this paper we describe a basic approach for the coordination of the production of new and adequate goods and services within a business network based on collaborative behavior following the rules of natural swarms. The approach offers possibilities to build new business models for service integrators while exploiting new and innovative kinds of customer behavior. To analyze and explain the mechanisms of the approach as well as its effects on performance, i.e. productivity, we present a cause-effect-model which serves as a basis for the next research step.