Abstract
The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) is an organizational approach which allows competitive enterprises to cooperate with each other. It is necessary to put aside the operating realizations to formalize this new approach in order to build up a theory to base the empirical experimentation. This work is a contribution to the formalization with the goal of understanding how competitive enterprises with heterogeneous organizations and belonging to different areas, can coexist in a same DBE. The formalization proposed has a logical reading based on processes models. Thanks to the use of the process models it is possible to organize some tools which allow to quickly build platforms for DBE management and governance and to make this flexible to comply with the different operating modes foreseen by the management of the enterprises which are part of the DBE.