Improving the Sustainability of SOA Providers’ Networks via a Collaborative Process Innovation Model

Companies from the software sector have been seeking new, sustainable business models. A key strategy to achieve is innovation. Being a sector largely formed by SMEs, a general problem is to keep innovation a sustainable practice. Many companies have been shifting their systems’ architectures to SOA, but despite its potentials, SOA projects are often costly, complex and risky. One approach to mitigate this is endowing companies with means to innovate collaboratively. Current innovation models are mostly devoted to the manufacturing sector, without supporting the many software and SOA specificities. We present a collaborative innovation process model as a contribution to fill this gap. The model combines open and network innovation approaches and allowing the tailoring of process composition to accommodate the uniqueness of innovation projects. The proposed model was evaluated by industry.