The software-intensive business community has emerged through different workshops that later unified within the International Workshop on Software-intensive Business. For example, the International Workshop on Software Ecosystems (IWSECO, 2009-2017) and the International Workshop on Software Startups (IWSS, 2015-2017), and others were created independently.
IWSiB workshop emerged at the Dagstuhl Seminar (held from April 29 to May 2, 2018) on “Software Business, Platforms, and Ecosystems: Fundamentals of Software Production Research”. About 30 researchers working in this area met to define the field of software-intensive business and to develop a research agenda to increase visibility and impact of software production research. As part of this process, the community decided to propose a regular workshop, ideally co-located with major software engineering conferences, to raise awareness and to continue the efforts. Since then, the workshop has became a leading avenue to entice young software business researchers into a wider software engineering community.
Past workshops
IWSiB 2021

The fourth IWSiB: Fueling a Software-driven Economy was hosted by XP 2021 conference and it was held as a one-day online workshop.
Professor Guenther Ruhe, from University of Calgary, delivered a keynote address on “The Return-of-Investment Perspective on Machine Learning in Software-Intensive Business”.
Papers
- Andrey Saltan, Kari Smolander: SaaS Pricing Practices Typology: A Case Study.
- Robert Evertse, Abel Lencz, Tea Sinik, Slinger Jansen, Lamia Soussi: Is Your Software Ecosystem in Danger? Preventing Ecosystem Death Through Lessons in Ecosystem Health.
- Jaakko Vuolasto, Kari Smolander: Genesis of a Wood Harvesting B2B Software Platform.
- Virginia Springer, Dimitri Petrik: Towards a Taxonomy of Impact Factors for Digital Platform Pricing.
- Samuel Onyango, Emilie Steenvoorden, Joram Scholten, Slinger Jansen: Assessing the Health of the Dark Web: – An Analysis of Dark Web Open Source Software Projects.
- Tor Sporsem, Anastasiia Tkalich, Nils Brede Moe, Marius Mikalsen, Nina Rygh: Using Guilds to Foster Internal Startups in Large Organizations: A Case Study.
- Anastasiia Tkalich, Nils Brede Moe, Tor Sporsem: Employee-Driven Innovation to Fuel Internal Software Startups: Preliminary Findings.
- Jorge Melegati: Towards a Framework to Guide the Creation of Development Practices for Software Startups.
IWSiB 2020
The third IWSiB: Unleashing the business potential of software was hosted by XP 2020 conference and it was held as a one-day online workshop. Keynote presentations for the workshop were given by Professor Michael A. Cusumano, the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and Dr. Christop Bussler, Solutions Architect at Google, Inc.
Professor Cusumano’s keynote presentation
Quantum Computing as the Next Software Applications Platform
Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman challenged the computing community to build a quantum computer almost 30 years ago. Now seems like a good time to review the business of quantum computing. How do quantum computers work? How to build quantum computers? What are the technical hurdles? What applications should quantum computers excel at? And who are leading the race of quantum computing? Considering the similarities of quantum computing development to the early years of conventional computing, this keynote provides answers to these intriguing questions, envisions quantum computing as the next software applications platform, and reveals the implications to Software Engineering research and practice.
Dr. Bussler’s keynote presentation
Advances in Public Cloud Technology as Foundation for Global Software-Intensive Businesses
Software-intensive businesses depend on software to implement their business model and business processes. Software can be deployed into public clouds on classic computing and storage infrastructure similar to that of private data centers. However, current technology advances in public clouds fundamentally change the abstractions of compute, storage and services like Machine Learning. The new computing abstractions change in significant ways the foundation of software architecture and the software development process. This presentation discusses and highlights the cloud technology advances of Google Cloud and how global software-intensive businesses confronted with an ever increasing competition can significantly benefit from the new abstractions.
Papers
- Kelson Silva, Eduardo Guerra, Jorge Melegati: An Approach for Software-Intensive Business Innovation Based on Experimentation in Non-software-Intensive Companies.
- Jorge Melegati, Rafael Chanin, Afonso Sales, Rafael Prikladnicki: Towards Specific Software Engineering Practices for Early-Stage Startups.
- Saeid Heshmatisafa, Marko Seppänen: API Utilization and Monetization in Finnish Industries.
- Gabriella Laatikainen, Alexander Semenov, Yixin Zhang, Pekka Abrahamsson: ICO Crowdfunding: Incentives, Pricing Strategy, Token Strategy and Crowd Involvement.
- Gabriella Laatikainen, Alexander Semenov, Yixin Zhang, Pekka Abrahamsson: What Key Aspects Do ICOs Reveal About Their Businesses?
- Stefan Trieflinger, Jürgen Münch, Emre Bogazköy, Patrick Eißler, Jan Schneider, Bastian Roling: Product Roadmap Alignment – Achieving the Vision Together: A Grey Literature Review.
- Andreas Kaselow, Dimitri Petrik, Sven Feja: Exploring the Success Factors for a Launch of an Algorithmic Consulting Platform.
IWSiB 2019
The second IWSiB was hosted by ESEC/FSE 2019 conference in Tallinn, Estonia.

A keynote presentation for the workshop was given by Professor Pekka Abrahamsson, University of Jyväskylä.
Software-Intensive Business Research in Crisis: A Way Forward
Papers
- Dimitri Petrik, Georg Herzwurm: iIoT ecosystem development through boundary resources: a Siemens MindSphere case study.
- Andrey Saltan: Do we know how to price SaaS: a multi-vocal literature review.
- Jorge Melegati, Xiaofeng Wang: QUESt: new practices to represent hypotheses in experiment-driven software development.
- Jürgen Münch, Stefan Trieflinger, Dominic Lang: DEEP: the product roadmap maturity model: a method for assessing the product roadmapping capabilities of organizations.
- Kai-Kristian Kemell, Polina Feshchenko, Joonas Himmanen, Abrar Hossain, Furqan Jameel, Raffaele Luigi Puca, Teemu Vitikainen, Joni Kultanen, Juhani Risku, Johannes Impiö, Anssi Sorvisto, Pekka Abrahamsson: Software startup education: gamifying growth hacking.
- Alexander Nolte: Touched by the Hackathon: a study on the connection between Hackathon participants and start-up founders.
- Sami Rusthollkarhu, Leena Aarikka-Stenroos: The effects of AI-human-interaction to value creation in multi-actor systems: how AI shapes digital B2B sales.
- Teppo Yrjönkoski, Kari Systä: Productization levels towards whole product in SaaS business.
- Hanna Härkönen, Juhani Naskali, Kai Kimppa: Hub companies shaping the future: the ethicality and corporate social responsibility of platform economy giants.
- Mercy Njima, Serge Demeyer: Value-based technical debt management: an exploratory case study in start-ups and scale-ups.
IWSiB 2018
The first SiBW was held in Espoo (Greater Helsinki), Finland and the event was sponsored by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd. The one-day workshop was organized as a pre-event for SLUSH, the World’s leading startup event.
- Eriks Klotins: Software start-ups through an empirical lens: are start-ups snowflakes?
- Kai-Kristian Kemell, Xiaofeng Wang, Anh Nguyen-Duc, Jason Grendus, Tuure Tuunanen, Pekka Abrahamsson: 100+ metrics for software startups – A multi-vocal literature review.
- Dron Khanna, Xiaofeng Wang: The buried presence of entrepreneurial experience-based learning in software startups.
- Sabine Molenaar, Martijn van Vliet, Luc Beelen, Slinger Jansen: Business as usual? On the nature of relationships in enterprise software platform ecosystems.
- Dimitri Petrik, Georg Herzwurm: Platform ecosystems for the industrial internet of things – A software intensive business perspective.
- Tapani N. Joelsson, Sami Hyrynsalmi, Sabine Molenaar: The role of prosumers in the evolution of a software ecosystem: Case Steam.
- Arash Hajikhani: Entrepreneurial oriented discussions in smart cities: Perspectives driven from systematic use of social network services data.
- Marja Turunen, Matti Mäntymäki: Collective consciousness in business ecosystems.
- Andrey Saltan, Ahmed Seffah: Engineering and business aspects of SaaS model adoption: Insights from a mapping study.
- Zeena Spijkerman, Slinger Jansen: The open source software business model blueprint: A comparative analysis of 10 open source companies.
- Teppo Yrjönkoski: How to support transformation from on-premise products to SaaS? Position paper for future research.
- Felix Schönhofen, Sixten Schockert, Georg Herzwurm: ISO 16355 in software-intensive business.
- Andrey Saltan, Slinger Jansen, Kari Smolander: Decision-making in software product management: Identifying research directions from practice.
- Jan Bosch, Helena Holmström Olsson, Ivica Crnkovic: It takes three to tango: Requirement, outcome/data, and AI driven development.
- Jorge Melegati, Xiaofeng Wang: Do software startups innovate in the same way? A case survey study.
- Jürgen Münch, Stefan Trieflinger, Dominic Lang: Why feature-based roadmaps fail in rapidly changing markets: A qualitative survey.
- Rafael Chanin, Dron Khanna, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Xiaofeng Wang, Afonso Sales, Rafael Prikladnicki, Pekka Abrahamsson: Software startup education around the world: A preliminary analysis.
- Katariina Yrjönkoski, Anu Helena Suominen: Effectuation as a frame for networking decisions – The case of a Finnish information technology start-up.
- Matthias Gutbrod, Jürgen Münch: Teaching Lean Startup principles: An empirical study on assumption prioritization.