The ambition of E4 STREP is to be the catalyst of current and past R&D multi-disciplinary efforts (organisational, managerial, psychological, socio-economical, technical) to finally apply cbusiness and extended product paradigms to enlarged EU SMEs, irrespective of the sector they belong to and of their geographical location.

The method followed will be a holistic multi-dimensional collaborative approach which is able to encompass all stages of collaboration from “cradle-to-grave” (initiation, management, operational life and dissolution), all phases of extended products’ development (conception, design, prototyping), all forms of collaboration (ad-hoc, mediated and planned) and all enterprise assets in any type of business network (people, ICT-systems, processes and knowledge assets).

This holistic paradigm requires a multi-disciplinary and multi-sector perspective, in which human skills and competencies, heterogeneous knowledge assets, independent business models and proprietary ICT systems have to become cooperative & concurrent working teams, shared & accessible resources, synchronised & interconnected processes, inter-operable & open enterprise applications.

To obtain all this E4 aims at developing and engineering a platform to support project and process management which integrate the tools and functions required by the networks they belong to in a cost-effective way. It will moreover support a seamless data exchange with the different levels: design constraints, partial BOMs (Bill of Materials) from above; partial drawings, BOMs and project KPI (Key Performance Indicators) from below.

The project will rely upon ASP concepts to provide the required resources – tools or services in a Web based mode to be paid on a use basis – and will define or complete appropriate ontology.