Digital Ecosystem (DE) is an emerging paradigm for economic and technological innovation. It consists of a self-organizing digital infrastructure, aimed at creating a digital environment for networked organizations (or agents) thsupporting the cooperation, knowledge sharing and development of open and adaptive technologies and evolutionary domain knowledge rich environments. DE captures the essence of the ecological community in nature, where biological organisms form a dynamic and interrelated complex ecosystem, in analogy with economic organisms (such as business entities) or digital organisms (such as software applications). Digital species, just like biological ones, ‘create and conserve resources that humans find valuable’.

The DE paradigm is increasingly regarded as the main driver behind “business model innovation in the Digital Economy”. It transcends traditional rigorously defined collaborative environments, such as centralized (client-server) or distributed (peer-to-peer) models into agents-based, loosely coupled, domain-specific and demand driven interactive communities which offer cost-effective digital services and value-creating activities that attract agents to participate and benefit from it.     

DEs can be specifically developed for the Small and Medium Enterprise community, where species in the ecosystem include virtual enterprises, business portals, service brokers and organizational databases.

DE technologies provide transparent, open ICT support to the ecosystem’s intelligence and knowledge based development, moving away from isolated business to business cooperation toward systemic collaboration, competition and synergy with partners, enabling virtual economic districts and enhancing their competitiveness over the global market.

The key strategic direction of the IEEE DEST 2007 conference is conveying DE vision and  research results  to Enrich Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

Today, SMEs compose over 90% of all the world's industry and 95% of them belong to the private sector. They are a major part of the global economy especially in developing countries where their vitality, together with the innovation potential of DEs could lead to the establishment of profitable niche markets. Process digitalisation in the framework of digital ecosystems will foster new partnerships and collaborative research.

An important part of the strategy of this IEEE DEST 2007 conference is to work together with SMEs towards the adoption of DE-based business models and technologies.

The 1st IEEE DEST conference will become the main international forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange information regarding advancements in the practice of advanced models for designing and deploying inter-organizational digital business processes involving networks of small and medium enterprises.