The full conference name is "Concurrent Innovation: An Emerging Paradigm for Collaboration & Competitiveness in the Extended Enterprise". The conference will be held 4-6 June 2007 in Sophia-Antipolis, France.

Increasing global competitive environment imposes the compelling need to identify new paradigms, methods, applications and technologies to better support creativeness and innovation. Open Innovation, Co-Creation Living Labs and Front-End Innovation are brand new paradigms addressing the entire product design and development process. Hence the future of Concurrent Enterprising lies within the context of integrated design of customisable products, comprehensive services, and flexible/adaptable organisations where individuals, groups, businesses and communities collaborate together within loosely or tightly coupled networks through the use of on-line shared workspaces.

Now it is time to go a step forward, this is why ICE’2007 main theme is strongly related to the preparation of the new ESoCE-NET vision and roadmap. The previous one, published in 2004 and entitled “A Roadmap towards the Collaborative Enterprise – CE Vision 2010” needs to be revised, updated and complemented according to the up-coming new paradigms, methods, applications and technologies. ICE’2007 participants are invited to this discussion and to take part in this roadmapping exercise. Our current vision is based on recent studies (Gartner and ESoCE-NET) showing that by 2010 most knowledge workers or eProfessionals and citizens will spent 70% of their time working collaboratively and invest a significant part of their time 33% within communities of co-creators, helping them to realize their Knowledge, Business and Social expectations. Furthermore, it is forecasted that by 2010 most European Regions will set up Living Labs as a strategic differentiator for competitive regional development.

Best in class corporations currently perceive that they are approaching a limit of their innovation potential within current organizational structures. Technology is not solving societal issues. A new organisational paradigm is required where individuals break out of the traditional organisation borders and where networks of knowledge worker peers (e.g. professional communities) become the centre of the organisational constellation. Citizens are also involved into the co-creation process as a chance to influence the development of new products and services. The breakthrough concept is to create an entanglement between the network of individuals and the organisations, unleashing the power of collective intelligence in an open innovation environment. The European network of co-creative Living Labs constitutes the foundation of a Common European Innovation System. The Living Lab is an “ICT enabled functional region” empowering the citizens and the professionals of the region, in their real life social settings, to perceive, create and validating innovations solving pressing societal issues in an open collaboration with Industry, Academy and Public Institutions.

But what does this mean in practice and research? How does this change engineering methodologies, applications and tools? How to design tangible and intangible goods in an integrated manner? Which information and communication technologies are needed to support new form of organisations and new ways of working? What is the impact on engineering work and future on-line workplaces? Which social and legal issues need to be considered? How co-creation Living labs could help us in involving all stakeholders (Public-Private partnership), including EU citizens, in the design and experimentation of new approaches, methods and technologies?

These are the burning questions which the ICE 2007 will focus its attention on. It will bring leading researchers and practitioners together from all over the World presenting the newest findings from research and sharing practical cases from industry.

The ICE 2007 Organising Committee invites high quality papers to be presented at this premier international event on Concurrent Enterprising. Submissions are invited on substantial, original and previously unpublished research in the topics of the conference.

Submission deadline - 31 January 2007

Read more:

ICE’2007 web-site

ESoCE-NET

European network of co-creative Living Labs