Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for a Knowledge Base of Regulatory Issues: Trust in Digital Business Ecosystems

The aim of this chapter is to summarise research on the factors contributing to the establishment of trust amongst small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Digital Business Ecosystems. This chapter describes the development of a Knowledge Base of Regulatory Issues that are important in the context of the development of Free Software/Open Source (FS/OS) for commercial use within the European Union countries. The Knowledge Base of Regulatory Issues arising from SMEs' participation in Digital Business Ecosystems is discussed in the wider context of the Digital Business Ecosystems initiative to indicate the results of initial research, to highlight aspects of the change of paradigm associated with ecosystems which involve trust, and to emphasise the need to confront conceptual research on technological change with empirical examination of the real-life contexts in which these ecosystems are developing. In order to achieve this aim, in section 1 the core theoretical issues are identified and examined in terms of the engagement and participation of SMEs in Business to Business (B2B) collaborations within ecosystems. Issues of trust were identified in the early phase of the research as having the potential to constrain SME participation in e-business initiatives. Section 1 presents a conceptual analysis of the layers of trust required for increasing SME participation. Section 2 presents an illustration of the rationale leading to the methodology used to establish a taxonomy framework for addressing the regulatory issues. In section 3 a three-dimensional taxonomy framework is presented, together with a discussion of the Knowledge Base of Regulatory Issues that emerged as being of critical importance for developing trust among SMEs involved in ecosystems, that is, privacy, e-signatures and security, jurisdiction and consumer protection. The conceptual framework was examined empirically by interviewing SMEs with respect to their views and concerns about the Digital Business Ecosystem vision and their experiences during the DBE project. The results of the interviews were used as a means of testing the validity of the taxonomy framework and the Knowledge Base that was developed. The validity of the Knowledge Base was verified and new insights into the importance of the Knowledge Base for SME engagement with Digital Business Ecosystems in the European Union were obtained. Section 4 summarizes the main empirical findings and overall conclusions are presented in section 5