Adaptation and Value Creating Collaborative Networks

Recent interest in capitalizing on the social network phenomenon has shown some relatively successful benefit to the business world. Social networking can sustain large-scale collaborative strategies between people and organizations. However, the main challenge remains the smooth weaving of social networks into organizations daily operations. In this paper we extend the reach and scope of social networks for an entire organization and show how they provide benefit to the business as a whole. We introduce a multi-layered social network model where people may play simultaneously one or more roles (e.g., suppliers, competitors, and customers) and participate in providing products, supporting services, and/or consuming them in sustainable collaborative environments. The experiments demonstrate both the widespread interest and possibilities of online social communities to foster collaboration among organizations.

This paper describes and discusses the results of an empirical study about social-networks/microblogging adoption in a financial institution. Social networking at the workplace literature is overviewed and then presented the methodology and hypothesis of the study. Interviews, a survey and a experimental pilot were used as data collection methods. An extract of the results related with the experimental pilot are discussed and some conclusions derived from them.

Since the eighties of the 20

th

century that the social and organizational sciences are interested in networks as organizational configuration and the identification of the dimensions that determine or influence the effectiveness of their performance, their adaptability and resilience. Communication and power are two of these core dimensions, because they strongly influence the degree of trust latent in the network, and trust is the key ingredient of human systems optimization. Very often a third, as neutral perceived party, plays a determinant role in the systematic negotiation process, which is inherent to collaborative networks [10] dynamics. We argue that computer platforms, perceived as a neutral and transparency enhancer device, may play an important role as trust promoter, namely in strong uncertainty avoidance contexts.

The characterization and assessment of the social capital of a collaborative network is an important element to help promoting the success of collaboration. The development of indicators of social capital can help enterprise managers not only to analyze and measure their social capital but also to support the decision-making processes. However, models and mechanisms to measure the social capital in collaborative contexts are lacking. Starting with a brief discussion about the nature of social capital and applying some concepts from social networks theory this paper introduces some perspectives and criteria to identify and measure the value of social capital of a member of a Virtual organization Breeding Environment.

This work presents a revision of the main definition and significances of the term Intellectual Capital, as it is an important issue of study. Once the main scientific works related to Intellectual Capital are presented and their main contributions highlighted, this work shows how it has been attempted to measure the Intellectual Capital at both individual enterprises and collaborative networks, as a source of meaningful information to make decisions. The paper evidences the lack of works that have successfully dealt with measuring Intellectual Capital at the collaborative networks level, highlighting the main barriers and what a proper measuring framework should address at this level.

Social capital is put forward as a suitable theoretical framework to explain knowledge sharing mechanisms in organizations. The aim of this paper is to summarize lessons learned from different contexts where the social capital dimensions have been used to explain information and knowledge sharing. The contexts studied are mainly within business organizations, virtual worlds, and higher education. The dimensions of social capital have been found useful when exploring knowledge sharing practices. The studies illuminate important aspects on how the combination of structures, relations and contents support sharing. The different cases also underline the importance of the

contextual dimension

, the role of the social capital dimensions are focused differently depending on context.

Collaborative Networked Organizations are being considered a response to the economic market pressures. Some research projects try to identify the key factors that enable the growth and survival of these collaborative networks. One strategy is to create Virtual Organization Breeding Environments in order to prepare organizations and persons to rapidly respond to a collaboration opportunity. In those breeding environments is possible to develop endogenous resources that permit collaborative practices, like social capital. The present paper discusses the importance of Social Capital and its relationship with Knowledge Management for Virtual Organization Breeding Environments. Knowledge is created during the processes of collaborative networks that rarely are documented and reused. Implementing an effective Knowledge Management method will motivate to increase Social Capital. The present work points out that knowledge sharing is important to develop Social Capital in three Brazilian collaborative networks called VIRFEBRAS, APROVALE and APROBELO.

The design, production and distribution of small series of health fashionable goods for specific target groups of wide impact in terms of market for the European industry as elderly, disables, diabetics and obese people represents a challenging opportunity for European companies which are asked to supply the demand with affordable price and eco-compatible products. Added to this challenge, textile, clothing and footwear manufactures seek for innovative collaborative networking solutions that could provide an entire digital life-cycle for the products and services required by the market. Aligned with this need, the EU CoReNet project aims to design and develop a new smart collaborative consumer-driven framework with the related services and components. This paper addresses the multidisciplinary complexity of customer-oriented and eco-friendly networks for health fashionable goods in particular addressing business requirements analysis, value chain issues, co-planning production and co-design topics in collaborative business processes tailored for high variability of the consumers demand and expectations.

The Non Timber Forest Products (NTFP) value chains are viewed as an alternative for the forest conservation and for the improvement of life conditions of Traditional Communities. These products are part of different chemical, cosmetic, food and pharmaceutical industries, which are trying to improve the sustainability of their supply chains. For the improvement of inter-organizational NTFP network in the Amazon region, an adapted value chain map was structured to map the Value Network and foster the strategic planning process. The mapping tool brought the whole scenario view for planning process, helping to integrate knowledge, values and perspectives, resulting in a common view for the NTFP Value Network future.

A new conceptual design for service procurement networks may surpass existing limitations and bottlenecks. Thereby efficiency can be improved and transaction costs be reduced. To overcome existing limitations a design approach is presented that supports enterprise application integration based on master data and company-wide business process integration. Master data is harmonized with standardized data types and service-oriented architectures (SOA). eBuS-XML is introduced, in the proposed solution it serves as service-specific XML-based library for transaction data types, storage and integration of service e-procurement order processing.

The development and support of highly customized and service-enhanced products requires new organizational structures, involving the manufacturers, customers and local suppliers in a process of co-creation. This requires the implementation of the glocal enterprise notion with value creation from global networked operations and invol ving global supply chain management, product-service linkage, and management of distributed manufacturing units. An approach based on cloud-computing and advanced collaboration spaces is proposed for such contexts. As application scenario the manufacturing and life cycle support of solar parks is considered.

To compete in globalized business environments, manufacturing firms, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs), need to be collaborative with respect to their total product life cycle. In this research, a focus on complex products is proposed and a new approach to structure collaboration in design and operational activities is suggested. A complete framework and guidelines for collaborative product design, development and manufacturing is proposed with respect to two product development scenarios: Engineer-to-Order (ETO) and Customize-to-Order (CTO). The ETO scenario, which is project-based, and the CTO scenario, which is platform-based, are employed to respond to individualized and market driven production strategies respectively. The CTO scenario is developed using the platform-based product family concept, following a new approach that uses a product configurator and white boxes to assure sustainable customization. The research also explains how the transition from ETO to CTO can be implemented, aiming at improving the customization level and profitability of SMEs. The overall results, lessons learned and future research directions conclude the paper.

In the last recent years the globalized world has experienced its most amazing and rapid technological evolution. The repercussions and consequences of this (re-)evolution are many and can be seen and felt in the behavior of the enterprises and the consumers. For enterprises, new organizational structures are taking place contributing even for the emergence of the scientific discipline called Collaborative Networks. For consumers, a more active - and less reactive - role is gaining evidence and being directly influenced by the advances on information and communications technologies. The new web generation is participating in a silent movement of creation of prosumers. As a consequence of this change in the behaviour of the enterprises and the consumers, a new space comes up with a high potential to be exploited. This space is seen as: products co-design or co-development environment. However, to lead the organizations in this collaborative relationship is necessary a fit coordination with specific competences to each case.

Enterprises today face many challenges related to lack of interoperability. But several business and technical solutions are available to bridge this gap. This paper presents a structured and tooled methodology to help decision-makers to quantitatively assess interoperability solutions for their networked enterprise. Practically, this research work proposes an a priori performance measurement system that is able to model and simulate different interoperability solutions. Through a bi-dimensional analysis (stakes and accessibility), the system allows comparing all the potential solutions in order to choose the best one for the network. This scientific proposition is finally implemented on a real application case extracted from the French ISTA3 research project.

Global competitiveness obliges to enterprises to collaborate in many processes such as new product and services development in order to shorten the lifecycle, development and commercialization. Therefore, the competence has drifted from an individual focus to a supply chain management one and, from some years, to a collaborative enterprises network approach. It is common to find frameworks for measuring/managing the performance within extended enterprises, supply chains, virtual enterprises, etc. However, few authors deal with a higher level: the collaborative networks one. This concept of enterprises management set up bigger difficulties regarding not only from a conceptual and structural point of view but also considering both the design and posterior development of systems capable of managing the performance achieved in this type of organizations. This work describes both the main difficulties and barriers when trying to apply performance management concepts to collaborative networks. In this sense, it is highlighted the weaknesses of the existing intra-organizational frameworks that cannot be projected, as they are conceived, to manage performance within collaborative networks.

Performance management in collaborative networks requires approaches suitable to deal with a larger domain than in traditional organisations, including new processes, new stakeholders and a less clear border between internal and external. The proposed approach addresses objectives and strategies setting, performance measurement and evaluation, monitoring, learning and improvement. It relies on the identification of key stakeholders and on their key success factors which provide the external perspective driving the performance evaluation and improvement. The work starts from the consideration of different natures and life times of Business Communities and Virtual Organisations, analyses the stakeholders’ relations and emphasises the clear identification of value creation for stakeholders as an essential component to align organisations.

Collaboration is one of the most commonly used strategies in the business environment. Enterprises that collaborate need reliable and efficient performance information. However, many collaborative enterprises fail to implement a common performance measurement system in an adequate manner due to the lack of sound mechanisms that connect all the elements within a performance measurement system. The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodology based on a multi-criteria decision method that aids to implement the different elements that compose a performance measurement system for collaborative networks. With this methodology enterprises have a tool to define all the aspects involved in the performance measurement system and to implement it. This approach has been applied to a collaborative enterprise network belonging to the automotive sector.

This paper aims to explore the performance alignment in collaborative network environments. It has been stated that performance management based on data collection and the evaluation of key performance indicators (KPIs) may not be effective due to the different indicators and measurement systems in place for the various participants in a collaborative network (CN). Therefore, measuring the strategic and inter-organizational alignment based on key alignment indicators (KAIs) can be an excellent alternative to improve performance evaluation systems. This approach has led to the exploration of the performance prediction paradigm and develops tools to estimate a performance and evaluate the degree of alignment by creating instances of a future performance in collaborative networks.

The dissolution of Virtual Organizations is not just a stage where the commitments between the partners take to an end, but an issue that is worth considering through all the life cycle in Virtual Organizations. This paper gives further light to the model of Virtual Organizations split in several phases, detailing their roles and significance, and explaining from previous experiences why the dissolution has to be carefully planned fairly in advance. The key elements for managing the dissolution of virtual organizations are described, and further evidence on how they can have positive influence to the performance of Virtual Organizations, are contributed highlighting the phase’s significance.

New integrated and technology-supported services are needed to face the challenges of rapidly ageing societies. Collaborative networks provide a promising framework for the development of such services, which require the involvement of multiple stakeholders. In this direction, a roadmapping initiative is addressing the implementation of a new vision for technological support to ageing. To support this vision, a strategic research plan focused on four life settings - independent living, healthy living, occupation in life, and recreation in life - is introduced. A large number of stakeholders coming from different backgrounds contributed to the design and validation of this roadmap.

There are more than 200 U3A groups in Australia where senior citizens collaborate to provide recreational learning opportunities to more than 60,000 other senior citizens. The movement continues to grow through the efforts of thousands of volunteers with very limited government support. We chose to use a collaborative network organisation modelling framework, ARCON, to both guide questions we asked in our research and to represent data from different instances in a consistent way. This provided a coherent view of the status quo, but supplementary questions were needed to consider the future viability of U3A groups. Spinoff network activities associated with some U3A groups were noted, suggesting the U3A model might be adapted for a variety of purposes. In such cases, it is hoped that the structured view provided by the ARCON framework might inform their design.

This paper introduces the concepts related to Distributed Business Processes (DBPs) associated to collaborative networks when applied to tourism and entertainment sector. These concepts are framed by the coordination activities and services orchestration to be used by tourism and entertainment providers. It brings to light the investigation about the needs associated to the tourism and entertainment areas when working collaboratively. There is a lack of ability for the service providers to recognize customers’ wishes in order to address their loyalty. Tourism and entertainment services are characterized as temporary arrangements that are well served by the arrangements provided in collaborative networks. This paper presents the enablers and the uncertainties related to the area in order to provide alternative solutions to cover the emergent needs, facilitate the enablers, and mitigate the uncertainties identified so far.

Studies present the importance of networks for SMEs, but few of them show the opportunities for technology transfer. The paper systematizes the goals that involve innovation networks as tools for prospecting opportunities for technology transfer in SMEs. It was conducted a case study in a high-tech company located in the state of São Paulo - Brazil. The goals were organized based on the objective model of the EKD (Enterprise Knowledge Development) methodology. As a result, it was possible to identify the problems, causes, constraints and opportunities influencing the environment and the collaboration. The paper contributes to future research to improve the network management.

This paper aims at identifying the knowledge transfer processes developed among R&D units and the competencies that are locally created to earn power by knowledge within these global innovation networks. Te paper’s empirical section is grounded on two multinationals with R&D units in Portugal, one from a Norwegian electronic multinational and another from a Spanish automotive component multinational. Crossing the theoretical debate with the empirical results we expect to offer an insight on the understanding of knowledge transfer processes.

Industrial clusters can be seen as a type of collaborative networks with a geographically limited scope, since they are environments where firms can collaborate to improve collective efficiency and form networks for knowledge creation and sharing. This paper reviews some contributions found in the literature concerning knowledge management in industrial clusters and proposes a new knowledge management framework to assist local governance in conducting initiatives aiming at creating and sharing knowledge among firms. The framework is still theoretical and future research is necessary for improvement and validation of its phases.

The way supply networks are designed has evolved through the years in order to address changes in the business environment, such as increasing customer service requirements, shortening of product life cycles and never ending pressures for inventory reduction. It is thus not surprising that hundreds of supply chain and supply network researches have been reported since the introduction of the concepts, focused on designing supply chains and networks so as to concurrently minimize logistics costs and maximize customer service in a turbulent and competitive environment.

This paper deals with the collaborative maritime transportation problem which can be modeled with two different approaches: System Dynamics (SD) and Agent Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS). In the literature concerning this topic they are indicated to model systems containing large numbers of active objects (industries, people, vehicles, warehouses, products) and their applications vary according to the required level of abstraction, which can consider more or less involved details. In order to contribute with the decision-making, one important logistic problem is adopted as example; and in the sequence, a comparative analysis between these two possible techniques to examine such problem is presented. Finally, this study describes how to model this problem using these techniques which improve the analysis of the global behavior of the supply chain. For further implementation, some recommendations are given.

There is only one way for the maritime cluster in Finland to survive. It has to be ready to respond rapidly to changes from the outside world. In order to prepare for the future, design companies and engineering consultants in the marine sector have to assess their current collaboration competence and continuously invest in increasing their engineering capability. It is becoming increasingly important to manage and develop competences for future new business environments. This paper presents a new approach to expanding the use of maturity models with the assessment of innovation and engineering capability. The paper reports on the development work of the new Innovation and Engineering Maturity Model and experience of using the model to identify fundamental and urgent competence development needs.

Many factors such as weak partner commitment, lack of proper partners’ alignment on interest and values, individualism, lack of flexibility, and loss of autonomy may cause partnership’s failures in collaborative networks. Most of these serious causes for conflicts in collaborative networks are rooted in partner’s behavior, therefore analyzing and modeling the behavioral aspects of collaborative networks are important to enforce their success. This paper first addresses two kinds of behavior related to collaborative networks including

Individual Collaborative Behavior

and

Network Collective Behavior

, and then introduces an approach to measure the comparative individual collaborative behavior of partners in networks.

Conflicts are frequent in virtually every scenario involving complex interactions. Collaborative Networks, in which there is a compromise between skills, competencies and resources, are not an exception. Moreover, these conflicts can be different in nature, ranging from cultural or relational conflicts to conflicts of interests. Although conflicts are common in these virtual settings, very few tools exist to settle them. Therefore, parties involved in conflict resolution generally have to resort to traditional approaches, which delay the process and waste the advantages of these Virtual Organizations. In this paper we present a structured model of a contract for a Collaborative Network. Based on this model, we developed an information system which is able to build conflict scenarios and determine the possible and probable outcomes. We combine this development with the UMCourt platform, which comprises a rich negotiation and mediation tool, to build a conflict resolution framework in the context of Collaborative Networks.

Power of partners in supply chain is an essential concept in collaboration, which can influence the decisions and behaviours of the focal company. Therefore, any company has to have a good understanding on the power of partners in order to determine the possible opportunities or threats in a potential collaboration. In this paper we present a product-oriented power taxonomy obtained from the analyses on two classes of power factors: the partner-independent power factors and the partner-dependent power ones. The former are related to the product and market while the latter are intrinsic ability factors of partner such as reputation, knowledge and performance. Then we analyse the different aspects of each type of power and corresponding determinants. Furthermore, we propose a method to assess those determinants.

This is a concept paper which introduces a dynamic extension to a collaborative network relationship analysis approach. The extension is based on the MetaMatrix approach known from the Dynamic Network Analysis field. Several entity classes representing agents, tasks, resources and knowledge are introduced and possible relations between entities of the different classes are analysed. All entity classes and relation classes are attributed with time related data which allows dynamic changes the system. Finally, some illustrative examples of typical collaborative interactions are introduced and explained.

Organisations have to adapt rapidly to survive in today’s diverse and rapidly changing environments. The idea of virtual organisations emerged as an answer. There is a strong need to understand virtual organisations (VOs) in a formal way: changes can have side effects and hence one might wish to understand precisely what consequences a change might have. The Virtual Organisation Modelling Language (VOML) consists of sub-languages to model different aspects of VOs such as their structure or operational models: VO-S deals with structural aspects while VO-R addresses reconfigurations. The concepts are exemplified through a travel booking VO that needs to cope with extra demands imposed by a large event such as the Olympic games.

High failure rates often observed in practice suggest that collaborative relationships are still not well understood. In this paper we investigate the nature of these relationships from second-order Cybernetics and Social Systems Theory perspectives. Thereby we develop a novel theoretical framework, the Collaborative System, which explains: 1. the organizational function of collaboration; 2. the system’s elementary operation; 3. its coupling mechanism; 4. the system autonomy and; 5. its ‘value’ creation mechanism. The proposed framework is innovative and has far reaching consequences for the understanding of different forms of collaborative relationships. Nevertheless, it raises a whole new set of questions yet to be explored.

Dynamic virtual organisations (VOs) can arise in situations in which it is critical that they continue to operate, even in sub-optimal environments. Models of information flow in dynamic VOs are therefore needed in order to permit the rigorous verification of resilience properties before commitments are made to implementation. This paper proposes a refinement-based modelling approach for the design and analysis of VO policy resilience. The approach is demonstrated by using the refinement-based formalism Event-B to model a VO structure, commonly referred to as the Bronze/Silver/Gold structure that frequently arises in multi-agency response to emergencies. Machine-assisted proof is used to compare the validity of alternative information flow policies in Bronze/Silver/Gold when a fault is induced in the VO structure.

The ever-increasing need for flexibility of business collaborations that ultimately involve a large number of virtual enterprises puts demands on their design. Competitive markets require the collaborations to be highly agile, effective, and efficient. This paper defines Internet scale virtual enterprise collaborations (ISVECs) as well as their characteristics. We further present a process modeling method for Internet-based virtual enterprise collaborations. An end user process modeling language of ISVECs and a meta-model of the language are provided. Finally, we demonstrate how the method and language are used.

Business value and coordination process perspectives need to be taken into consideration while modeling business collaborations. The need for these two models stems from the importance of separating the how from the what concerns. A business value model shows what is offered by whom to whom while a coordination process model shows how these offerings are fulfilled operationally. This case study addresses the model transformation between e3value and BPMN, commonly used for modeling business collaborations from value and coordination perspectives respectively.

Almost no construction project performs totally as planned as dynamic changes are frequently needed. These changes can be ascribed to the high uncertainty, which is evaluated as potential causes of risks and risks is in turn are evaluated as potential causes of plan changes. Several concepts from the Business Process Modeling domain are adopted to build an explicit process-oriented knowledge documentation of the construction processes. A standardized process description is suggested that offers flexibility in its content to be usable in different contexts. Configurable fragments in the course of the process models express the uncertain parts of the process. A general structure of a Configurable Reference Process Model (CRPM) is developed as an ontology model to document the construction processes in a Process-oriented Knowledge base. By using this knowledge base a considerable planning effort will be saved. Moreover, the quality of the process schedules, since they will be derived from the reference process models, will be enhanced and the expenditure of time will be reduced.

In a context of decision-aid to support the identification of collaborative networks, this paper focuses on extracting essential facets of firm competencies. We present an approach for enrichment of competence ontology, based on two steps where a novel effective filtering step is utilized. First we extract the correlation between terms of a learning dataset using the generation of association rules. Second we retain the relevant new concepts using an extracted semantic information. The suggested approach was tested on an ontology of mechanical industry competencies. Experiments were performed on real data, which show the usefulness of our approach.

Governments strive to achieve improvements in delivering public services, developing and implementing public policies, responding to crisis situations, and optimizing the use of public resources, among others. Achieving such goals requires collaboration across different levels and functions of government, and across public and private sectors in a Joined-Up Government. Establishing such collaboration requires information on prospective participants including their goals, resources, processes and services. Such information is rarely available in structured forms e.g. in databases, but instead scattered over government portals, publications and other textual sources. This paper proposes the use of semantic text mining for extracting collaboration-related information (focusing on government collaboration) from unstructured data sources. The proposed solution applies natural language processing techniques supported by the relevant domain and process ontologies. It consists of three steps: 1) extracting process-related information from textual sources, 2) creating process ontology instances from extracted information and 3) mining shared and integrated processes based on process instances and the service goal hierarchy in the domain ontology. The paper describes the rationale of and approach adopted in this research, the progress achieved in implementing step 1, the challenges encountered and how we intend to address them in pursuing subsequent steps.

This paper has as its objective to put forward a profile for the ‘manager of the future’. It draws on a review of the literature and on a series of unstructured interviews with 12 trainers, recruiters, directors and young graduates. Research carried out in large global companies in the fields of industry and multimedia confirms the under-exploitation of certain competences and the immergence of new forms of management and recruitment in modern companies. Generation Y is blossoming and, with its practices and its new demands, is jostling against traditional modes of management. This paper first highlights the tensions between individuals, the organization and its environment, plus the lack of recognition regarding these neo-managers’ competences and valuable talents. An analogy between managers and video game players leads us to the analysis of three case studies and to interviews with 12 experts in their individual professional fields: three trainers, three purchasing directors, and three young purchasing graduates. Their contributions, combined with the conclusions drawn from the case studies permit the co-construction of the profile of tomorrow’s manager, the “player manager”.

Service Orientation has been an extensively used approach to model the services Collaborative Networks’ (CN) members are willing to provide to customers. The evolution of this paradigm has followed an improvement path since its early forms. Nevertheless bottlenecks still exist, namely in what concerns: 1) a gap between the business and the information and communication technology perspectives; 2) an adequate Quality of Service (QoS) assessment mechanism for the CN context. As a contribution to these issues, this paper proposes: 1) the creation of a collaborative Service Ecosystem, introducing pro-activeness elements towards an auto-initiative representation of CN member’s services; 2) the introduction of a QoS mechanism needed to facilitate the assessment of services in a CN context.

Collaborative Networks (CN) realization fundamentally relies on the need of collaboration, from diverse perspectives, among partners. From the software perspective, CN members who have SOA-based solutions keep the involved web-services at their local silos. This means that the collaboration potential of CNs might be enlarged and reinforced if such silos could be opened up and shared among their members, hence decreasing development and hosting costs. This is relevant as CN members are mostly composed of small and medium size companies with usual high limitations of ICT resources. This paper presents the result of an exploratory research that proposes a model for service discovery as a mechanism to leverage software services sharing among partners under the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) access and business models. The developed model allows discovering the most suitable services for the required business processes, considering their contexts (using the UBL standard) and quality of services (QoS). A prototype has been developed to show the concepts. The assessment of the model is given in the end.

A fast evolution to collaborative business models requires novel strategies for the development of collaboration-based information technology (IT) solutions. The complexity of building such solutions based on heterogeneous sub-systems requires a multidisciplinary approach, involving the perspectives of technology and business/management. In this direction, a novel approach is proposed, introducing the notion of Cooperation Enabled System as an autonomous and adaptive computational component as the base constructor to develop open (collaborative) IT solutions.

Innovative forms of collaborations between companies have been proposed and modelled in literature in recent years. There is an increasing demand in the industrial world for concretely implement this new forms of collaborations. For example, demand often comes from pre-existent form of clusters or consortiums, which want to evolve to more efficient forms of collaboration. On the basis of a methodology whose guidelines have been proposed in a previous work by authors [1], the paper illustrates the steps and the tools utilized to analyze potential pool of partners in order to identify the type of long term Collaborative Networked Organizations (CNOs) alliance that would bring highest benefits to the partners. Three different forms of innovative CNOs are considered: the Virtual organizations Breeding Environment (VBE), the Virtual Development Office (VDO) and the T-Holding. The application of the proposed methodology is described in the case of a traditional industrial cluster of the metal-mechanic industry in Italy.

The paradigm of forming and sustaining Collaborative Networks as environments that create Virtual Organisations (VOs) assumes that effective (and efficient) enterprise engineering (EE) capabilities and processes are available. However, these processes are only effective if they produce VOs which have sufficiently limited complexity, because as complexity grows, the VO’s behaviour becomes increasingly harder to predict under all circumstances. This paper proposes the use of EE methods based on Extended Axiomatic Design Theory to limit the complexity of VOs – and of the CN itself. We introduce process- and people capability maturity levels, whereupon higher maturity implies higher probability of success of CNs in creating and maintaining VOs, and success of the VOs themselves, and formulate strategies for capability-improvement, intended to achieve higher levels of EE maturity.

Over time, Drivindus has become one of the world’s leading manufacturers of automotive parts. This industrial group is present in 20 countries, employing 50,000 persons from 50 different nationalities and running around 100 factories and 40 research centers. It generates annual revenues of nearly €10 billion. The firm’s General Management has noticed that productivity reserves still exist within its purchasing management function. The company has therefore decided to invest in an e-sourcing project. This case study describes this project which has been inspired from a real one and shows how an electronic marketplace has been designed to reach all the objectives. This case study takes between 4 and 6 hours to be solved by post graduate management students. They may be organized in groups of 4 and the instructor can go from one group to another to help them progress, according to their capacities, in answering the 5 questions. A PowerPoint presentation and teaching notes are provided to help in the animation of the case which has been tested and optimized in three different accredited management schools before its publication. It’s ideal to illustrate purchasing management evolution and information systems management.

This paper presents an exploratory and qualitative work of a novel model for the selection of the most adequate logistics providers that will compose a virtual organization. It includes a performance measurement model and a supporting methodology that considers the intrinsic dynamics, autonomy and temporality of Virtual Organizations, involving both intra and inter-organizational indicators at strategic levels. The model is flexible in terms of both allowing performance indicators’ weights relaxation and being adapted according to the organizations’ governance model.

A Virtual Enterprise (VE) is considered as a temporary consortium of member enterprises formed to pool their core competencies and exploit the market opportunities. Although a VE has many phases, such as business opportunity identification, formation and partner selection, operation and dissolution. The partner selection phase is considered to be of the utmost importance and care should be taken to assess all the risk factors. This paper examines the partner selection problem by considering three types of risks, individual performance risk, collaborative performance risk and network risk. Based on the information provided by the potentially collaborating enterprises, a mathematical model has been developed for calculation of all three types of risks.

Based on recent research in business process modeling and management enhanced integration of resource management can be beneficial. In this context appropriate resources can be identified by matching their profiles with business process requirements. Requirements may be generated from business process models as competence profiles, if advanced modeling techniques that enable detailed modeling are being used. Matching generated profiles to profiles of internal resources (typically maintained by human resource departments) or external business partners (organizations as well as individuals) requires profile descriptions at a similar level of detail. In order to enable sound matching of resource profiles between supplicants and suppliers in collaborative networks, we suggest modeling and system architecture that can handle these challenges. As one main pillar we will present a framework that allows formal description of competence profiles as well as their aggregation to common job profiles; we will outline this approach for the sector of information and communication technology (ICT). Formal description is accomplished by building profiles with the Resource Modeling Language (RML). Regarding architecture we focus on exchange and processing of profile description models. The practical application of our approach is demonstrated by formalization of competence descriptions given by the European e-Competence Framework (eCF).

The last decade has been characterized by times of change, including increasing levels of globalization and competition. Collaboration allowed SMEs to respond effectively to the development of new complex products and services but presented new barriers concerning the management of their business processes and relations with partners. This paper presents a new collaborative aggregate planning for non-hierarchical business networks, where SMEs collaborate in the selection of partners and definition of the operations plan required to specify, manufacture and distribute a custom made products. The proposed approach is based on negotiations undertaken by the partners in order to promote the creation of alternative operations plans and allow a multi-criteria evaluation of the involved costs and delivery dates. The proposed approach promotes the reduction of communication between partners, a reactive analysis of changes to planning and associated impact, enhancement of trust (since all partners have the same weight on the decision process).

The rate and intensity of large scale disasters, natural and induced by humans via deforestation, carbon emissions, terrorism etc appears to be steadily increasing. At the same time, mankind appears to create increasingly complex systems to sustain its survival, quality of life and evolution. Ensuring that the people and their vital systems survive and cope with the natural disasters require proper preparation, response and recovery. Unfortunately, often the organisations put in place to deliver emergency services operate in a sub-optimal way due to a plethora of factors, with a prominent role played by the lack of proper inter-operation and collaboration. This paper proposes the use of Collaborative Networks (CN) concept in Emergency Services from an Enterprise Architecture (EA) perspective so as to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge accumulated in these domains. Following an introduction and a brief review of the state-of-the-art, the paper justifies the adoption of the CN paradigm and demonstrates the use of an EA approach previously tested for the CN domain, in the Emergency Services area.

This paper illustrates how nuclear crisis are managed in France. It proposes IT solutions dedicated to event management that could help to resolve such a crisis by facilitating coordination between actors and increasing situational awareness. This study has been conducted as part of the European project PLAY. Requirements have been collected from different stakeholders through reviews of the literature, internal reports and websites, and interviews. Our proposal consists in the construction of a simulation tool to validate the complex-event processing architecture and the associated platform. The aim is to show the potential added value from the PLAY platform in the context of the response to a nuclear crisis.

The length and sheer scale of the current economic crisis has surprised managers, who were completely unprepared to deal with such an unanticipated situation. Standing at the heart of their businesses and providing a link between executives and employees, these managers need to limit the impact of the crisis in an environment in which various constraints, unexpected events and social tensions are on the increase. Restructuring and cost-killing are the first port of call, which makes buyers very busy people. However, some buyers are pioneering a new kind of collaborative management which, instead of increasing the pressure on suppliers and reducing risk-taking to a minimum, advocates taking new initiatives that are not aimed solely at maximising profits in the short-term. This article offers an overview of this new, foresight-based Procurement practice. After highlighting recent Procurement function developments, which were largely responsible for the consequences of the crisis, our constructivist methodology proposes to interview 12 buying experts in order to develop scenarios and identify the features of the Collaborative Procurement. The final section then presents: (1) new forms of internal and external collaboration; (2) the roles and specific skills of this type of the "buyer of the future"; and (3) how the globalised economy is becoming an increasingly community-based, collaborative virtual environment.

In this study, we analyze firms’ membership in R&D (Research and Development) cooperation networks trough simulation methods. Our main research hypothesis is that the membership in cooperation networks is related to the degree of the knowledge spillover. The approach has two scenarios: cost symmetry and cost asymmetry. We first develop an analytical model with three stages: firstly, firms decide whether to participate in a cooperative research network; secondly they simultaneously choose the level of R&D output, and finally they choose the level of output. Then we proceed with computational simulations to verify our hypothesis. From our results, we were able to conclude that cooperation leads to an improvement on RJV firms’ position in the market as they produce more than others with the same production conditions. Additionally, cooperating firms have to spend fewer resources on research, which turns the network a tremendous success on the productive efficiency level.

Information technology, with the recent developments towards Future Internet, creates expectations for enterprises and collaboration networks about ease of use and high business benefits. However, the benefits are not an automatic outcome of an IT system take-up. In addition to technical aspects, organizational implementation is needed, with user participation and enterprise collaboration in the process. This paper discusses the challenges and barriers of IT implementation in collaborative networks, with the aim to identify success factors for achieving the benefits. The study is based on previous research and uses the experience of collaboration business cases of COIN project (EU FP7 ICT 216256).

Cooperation is a key success factor for small and medium enterprises (SME) in most of the countries. At the beginning of the 2000s, a large European study has analysed the extent and the effect of cooperation between SMEs. However, how successful have been cooperation of SMEs during the economic crisis of the last years? Has the cooperation rate decreased or increased? What are the drivers and obstacles of SME cooperation? Based on an empirical study in a SME-rich region in Germany, which was finished in January 2011, these and further questions will be answered in detail.

Collaboration is a term commonly used to refer to a type of inter-organizational relationship. However, in real business assessments, many collaborative relationships fail due to the lack of understanding of the factors influencing collaboration sustainability. For this reason, enterprises, prior to engage to a collaborative relationship, need to understand further which the main factors influencing collaboration relationships are, how they are structured and how they interact so that decision makers that desire to engage in a collaborative relationship/network focus not only on improving performance indicators but also on the factors that influence the results of those performance indicators. The purpose of this paper is to present a critical literature review of factors influencing collaborative relationships in order to perform a comparative study of the works for identifying main strengths and gaps for future research.

A Green Virtual Enterprise (GVE) is an emerging sustainable manufacturing and logistics networked enterprise model focused on offering, delivering and recovering green products to/from the market, under a lifecycle thinking and supported by its source network. In this paper, a GVE Breeding Environment Reference Framework is proposed as a common architectural framework offering a clear approach for conceiving sustainable and fully flexible forward and reverse supply networks, within a breeding environment context, based on a set of five building blocks: targets, main actors, operating principles, lifecycle and supporting technologies, to create and manage GVEs.

End-of-life strategies, such as remanufacturing, have gained ground in order to promote product reuse, reduce environmental impacts and costs, as well as to win new markets. The remanufacturing process preserves part of the product’s raw materials and added value during its manufacturing. This study addresses the system that includes remanufacturing in order to understand it and to define its elements, as well as to characterize the supply chain that permeates and leads to the effective functioning of this system. To this end, a Systematic Literature Review on remanufacturing was conducted. Moreover, the RS proposed was based on the General Systems Theory.

Industrial Symbiosis is an important component of Industrial Ecology which studies the collaboration and coexistence of companies to achieve mutual benefits. Its concepts have traditionally focused on eco-efficiency and its direct benefits such as costs reduction, resources optimization and environmental impacts reduction. The paper introduces the use of externalities and collaborative networks as tools to amplify the spectrum of opportunities and, consequently, the potential value of Industrial Symbiosis development. Externalities are related to side effects of companies’ decisions and acts. They offer a broader systemic view to Industrial Symbiosis planning and execution. Sustainable value brings up intangible value drivers such as institutional, organizational and relationship capital as well as risk management consideration. It helps companies to visualize the totality of potential value of Industrial Symbiosis.