Name of the participant: Sebastian Gottschalk
Description of the IT-research project: Building an ecosystem around one’s own (software) products is nowadays part of the strategic orientation of many providers. In these so-called software ecosystems, the provider of a product makes a certain core functionality available to its users, which can be extended by services from third-party developers. For the ecosystem provider, this has the advantage of being able to offer a wide range of functions with lower development costs, while the third-party developers can directly access an existing user base. At the same time, however, the third-party developers run the risk of expensive misdevelopments if their services are not tailored to the actual needs of the users. While larger ecosystems can transfer this risk to third-party developers due to their market power, smaller and specialised ecosystems in particular need to support their third-party developers in developing new services. One support is to involve the existing user base of the ecosystem and thus the potential users of the service as early as possible in the idea and prototype phase of new services.
The project goal is to support third-party developers in such ecosystems by giving them access to the ecosystem’s user base as early as possible. To this end, an idea platform is to be developed on which third-party developers can make their ideas for new services available and validate them collaboratively by the users of the ecosystem. In concrete terms, existing literature and tools will first be analysed and design principles derived from them. In an iterative process, these design principles will now be implemented and evaluated with potential users of such a platform. Afterwards, recommendations for action will be derived from the results in order to support existing and new operators of software ecosystems.
Project website: https://www.sicp.de/projekte/kovas
Software Campus partners: Universität Paderborn, DATEV
Implementation period: 01.01.2021 – 31.12.2022