We propose a project to assess the viability of the many opportunities that are becoming available to develop innovative Internet-based services. The investigation will be carried out as a collaboration between the Imperial College Internet Centre and the Imperial College Innovation Studies Centre and will involve a range of commercial partners including Vodafone, Sun Microsystems, Transport for London, The 451 Group, the BBC, O2 and BT. The project will assess the economic and technical feasibility of a range of potential innovative Internet services, assess any generic underlying factors that need to be addressed in order to realise them, identify the most promising and determine the economic, regulatory and technical obstacles that need to be overcome to fully realise these opportunities. The outcome will be an overall assessment of these opportunities and a development and exploitation plan for those services identified as the most viable and economically important.Recent developments in computing technologies, including service oriented architectures, encapsulation, Grid computing and virtualisation have provided the opportunity to repackage many ICT processes as composable, use-on-demand services. This provides the possibility that the next-generation Internet could be refactored as a series of markets in use-on-demand, pay-per-use services. This in turn provides the opportunity to develop many new innovative services or to repackage existing services in more efficient manners. Being virtual or software-based many of these service opportunities are low-cost with very low barriers to entry and thus represent attractive opportunities for innovative enterprises.We will conduct a series of studies to assess the feasibility and viability of the above services. These studies will be carried in collaboration with our commercial partners by interviews and discussion. These studies will address the economic and technical feasibility of the ideas put forward here and seek to identify any steps: economic, regulatory or technical, that need to be overcome in order to realise these opportunities to the full. An initial assessment of the field will be made to identify any generic or underlying factors that need to be addressed. An evaluation will then be made to identify the most immediately promising opportunities. Those identified will be studied in more depth. The output of these studies will include an overall assessment of the field and, for those opportunities studied in depth, a roadmap detailing the business and technical developments needed to realise these opportunities. At the same time we will discuss with our commercial partners a potential development and exploitation plan. In this way we hope to be in a position to be able to rapidly develop and exploit the most promising opportunities thus identified.We identify service opportunities in third-party authored Web Services, Software as a Service, Virtual Facilities, Consumer Support Services, Community Services, Computational Resources Brokering and a General Service Broker.An initial assessment of the field will be made to identify any generic or underlying factors that need to be addressed. It may be that a few factors, e.g. secure payment, trust, are common among all applications and that their resolution would enable a whole family of opportunities to be realised. An evaluation will then be made to identify the most immediately promising opportunities. Those identified will be studied in more depth.The output of these studies will include an overall assessment of the field and, for those opportunities studied in depth, a roadmap detailing the business and technical developments needed to realise these opportunities. At the same time we will discuss with our commercial partners a potential development and exploitation plan. In this way we hope to be in a position to be able to rapidly develop and exploit the most promising opportunities.

We propose a Research Cluster to explore the opportunities and challenges of the Digital Economy. The Internet is driving many powerful convergences in media, devices and infrastructure provision. These convergences hold the promise that the next-generation Internet could be a very powerful and universal platform where a great deal of economic and social activity could take place. Given the universal nature of the Internet this platform would break down the traditional distinctions between, say business and the general public, and anyone from any sector could be a provider or a user of these services.If properly realised the benefits from these developments could be considerable. However, they will not happen automatically, there are many issues that need to be tackled before they can be fully achieved. Given the nature of the Internet these issues are as much economic, social, legal and regulatory as they are technical and, critically, these issues have been tackled together to provide an holistic and complete solution.We have assembled a multi-disciplinary consortium that includes talented and experienced research workers in all the fields necessary to address these issues and have established relationships with major stakeholders in the next-generation Internet. The Cluster is led by Imperial College, the University of Oxford and the University of Southampton. The Research Cluster would conduct an open investigation to identify the topics that need to be addressed and produce a roadmap or research and development agenda to tackle them. The Cluster proposes to hold two open workshops at the beginning and end of the one year study to involve the community as much as possible and to create expert Working Groups to address the critical issues. All these deliberations will be conducted in an open manner using Web 2.0 community networking techniques.The outputs of these deliberations will a programme of linked actions to drive forward the development of the Digital Economy. These will comprise multi-disciplinary research programmes, commercial exploitations, social or legal actions or regulatory recommendations. The Reserch Cluster will also be used to identify the coalitions, again both research and commercial, best suited to take forward these proposals.