User Participation & Mashups : an innovation catalyst in the Web 2.0 Era

The web 2.0 has emerged after the "dot-com bubble crash". This second generation of the Internet is a more mature, distinctive medium characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects. Regardless of their skills and expertise, users are given the opportunity to share, to enrich their respective/ mutual contributions, they become prosumers . The power of the crowd and of the ecosystems is acting more than ever before. This social behavior is becoming one of the major factors of innovation & value creation in the web 2.0 Era. These value creation and innovation come from mashups that are the combination/ orchestration/ aggregation by one player of basic building blocks (produced by other players) in order to create a new /composite block that is innovative, valuable and customized. This crowd-driven and mashup-based innovation process is already in action with a huge impact on the existing landscapes:

For sure the cloud computing, the SaaS  and the Internet of Services trends will boost the user-generated services & applications. But, in order to let a larger amount of people and operators attend the game many other challenges are still to be addressed (to enumerate a few):

As an operator / mediator, Orange is contributing to the emergence of this new era by:

Orange is also asking the academic communities help and support in order to address the above challenges and initiatives.