Fostering collaboration through API economy: the E015 digital ecosystem.

The API Economy trend is nowadays a concrete opportunity to go beyond the traditional development of vertical ICT solutions and to unlock additional business value by enabling innovative collaboration patterns between different players, e.g., companies, public authorities and researchers. Thus, an effective API Economy initiative has to be comprehensive, focusing not only on technical issues but also on other complementary dimensions. This paper illustrates a successful API Economy initiative, the E015 Digital Ecosystem developed for Expo Milano 2015, showing how a comprehensive approach to information systems interoperability and Service-Oriented Architectures can foster synergetic collaboration between industry and academia in particular, hence enabling the development of value-added solutions for the end-users.