BIVEE (Business Innovation in Virtual Enterprise Environments)

European industry, particularly the manufacturing industry, needs a boost in order to compete with the challenge presented by the globalised markets. Continuous production improvement and innovation need to become a ‘natural’ attitude of European enterprises. European industrial system is characterized by a large majority of SMEs (small and medium enterprises), to innovate and compete they need to rally in business ecosystems and operate as networked, virtual enterprises. Rallying the forces is a must when SMEs address innovation, since individually they lack the necessary critical mass. The Bivee project – Business Innovation in Virtual Enterprise Environments – proposes an integrated Software Environment aimed at promoting and supporting production improvement and enterprise innovation for networked SMEs and virtual enterprises. The Bivee Environment includes advanced methods for boosting creativity and innovation with an open approach, for supporting their lean implementation, for monitoring the concrete outcomes, managing the innovation ventures in a collaborative networked industrial setting, for creating shared knowledge repositories, leveraging on the collective intelligence of the communities. Tools being developed by Bivee will model the existing environment, create a playground where ideas creation is encouraged, nurtured, and validated, providing also a testing ground to prove new ideas.