"By 2020 enterprise collaboration and interoperability services will become an invisible, pervasive and self-adaptive knowledge and business utility at disposal of the European networked enterprises from any industrial sector and domain in order to rapidly set-up, efficiently manage and effectively operate different forms of business collaborations, from the most traditional supply chains to the most advanced and dynamic business ecosystems."The mission of the COIN IP is to study, design, develop and prototype an open, self-adaptive, generic ICT integrated solution to support the above 2020 vision, starting from notable existing research results in the field of Enterprise Interoperability (made available by the Enterprise Interoperability DG INFSO D4 Cluster and specifically by the projects ATHENA, INTEROP, ABILITIES, SATINE, TRUSTCOM) and Enterprise Collaboration (made available by projects ECOLEAD, DBE, E4 and ECOSPACE).In particular, a COIN business-pervasive open-source service platform will be able to expose, integrate, compose and mash-up in a secure and adaptive way existing and innovative to-be-developed Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration services, by applying intelligent maturity models, business rules and self-adaptive decision-support guidelines to guarantee the best combination of the needed services in dependence of the business context, as industrial sector and domain, size of the companies involved, openness and dynamics of collaboration.This way, the Information Technology vision of Software as a Service (SaaS) will find its implementation in the field of interoperability among collaborative enterprises, supporting collaborative business forms, from supply chains to business ecosystems, like a utility, the Interoperability Service Utility (ISU).The COIN project will finally develop an original business model based on the SaaS-U (Software as a Service-Utility) paradigm on the base of the open-source COIN service platform.