Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Organizations compete in acquiring competitive resources, knowledge, and competencies. However, in the current market, when an opportunity is brokered, organizations need to collaborate, more than competing, by sharing the acquired resources, knowledge, and competencies to respond to the opportunity which none of them could handle otherwise. This means organizational strategies must now adapt to the notion of collaboration with others. One important organizational strategy necessary in the virtual organization breeding environment (VBE) is focused on the organizational preparedness that is required to enhance the chances of participating in virtual organizations (VOs). A crucial aspect of preparedness is the establishment of trust relationships with other member organizations to smoothen the sharing of resources, knowledge, and competence, and in turn facilitate the organizations’ collaboration. In this paper we address approaches and mechanisms for establishment of trust relationships among member organizations in VBEs.

Value creation in the present day markets demands new kind of managerial logic. One manifestation of this can be seen in relation to R&D collaboration: while importance of external knowledge and networks of relationships is undoubtedly increasing as a source of competitive advantage, collaborations still frequently fail. In order to avoid this, companies need to find ways to manage factors that have an effect not only on the outcomes of collaboration but on each other as well Such important factors include trusting relationships, creating security through means such as contracts and intellectual property rights, and capabilities to absorb relevant knowledge. In this study we will examine these factors and their roles for R&D collaboration among 299 Finnish companies. Our results suggest that these factors are intertwined and that they are closely related to willingness to engage into R&D collaboration and the final outcomes.

In view of the competitive scenario in which organizations are currently inserted, it is necessary for them to adopt a philosophy of continuous learning, aiming at improving their products and processes, besides encouraging an environment that allows knowledge exchange and innovation. On the one hand CNOs aim at increasing competitiveness through the flow of knowledge aggregated to products and processes in a formal environment. On the other hand, CoPs rise up as a mechanism that permeates new structures of communication, encouraging institutional learning and knowledge sharing, combining common values to their members in informal environments. The aim of this article is to propose the use of CoPs within CNOs to promote trust among members, aiding and encouraging the practices of knowledge sharing.

Management activities need an appropriate information basis. This applies also to the management of Virtual Organizations (VO). A potential source for this information is Performance Measurement. But traditional Performance Measurement (PM) methodologies and indicators are designed to assess the performance of single companies or static networks. Specific challenges and requirements of VOs are not addressed in an appropriate way. An essential aspect is for instance the collaboration performance, which has in many VOs a vital impact on the success. The objective of this paper is to provide an approach for addressing collaboration performance in the performance measurement of a VO. Therefore the main perspectives of collaboration performance and examples for potential indicators are described.

Virtual Breeding Environments (VBEs) represent networks of disperse organisations, that wilt exploit specific collaboration opportunities through the creation of Virtual Organisations (VOs) supported by information and communication technologies (ICTs). This type of Collaborative Networked Organisation (CNO) should be able to generate different types of values (economical, social, cultural, etc) to its members and stakeholders. In this sense, the definition of a value system represents a useful network management tool for the recognition, measurement and configuration of value generation objects and activities inside the network. This paper presents a conceptual model that integrates the different value generation objects, fiom the different stakeholders, to describe a VBE value system that supports managerial activities in the network such as value co-creation and performance measurement.

Decision making and thus the individual and joint behavior in a collaborative network depend on the underlying value system. Therefore the identification and characterization of the value system of the network and its members is fundamental when attempting to improve the collaborative process. However the concept of value system is not formally defined yet and there is not even an agreement in research community about its intuitive definition. Departing from a formal definition of value and evaluation, this paper proposes a formal conceptual model for value system and discusses its application in collaborative networks management.

The paper approaches the problem of analyzing complex industrial bodies like the clusters of enterprises in order to evaluate their performances. The analysis is based on a formal model of a cluster of SMEs, represented in terms of its structure, its organization and its interactions with the outside. The paper aims at giving a comprehensive presentation of the evaluation approach to network organization developed in the EU-funded Coordination Action CODESNET (Collaborative DEmand & Supply NETwork), as well as of the “analysis road map” developed on the SME network model itself. A case study derived by an Italian industrial district is used to validate the proposed analysis approach.

Subject of this contribution is to develop a framework for assessment of collaborative networks (CN) structural stability on the stage of the CN design. CN design is a critical source of competitive advantage given that as much as 80% of total product cost may be fixed by these decisions. The importance of the stable CN structuring is evident. The elaborated framework aims to develop a technique for simultaneous CN structuring and its stability assessment based on parametric analysis of possible participants and integral stability assessment. This procedure is based on the application of special Index of Structure Consolidation (ISC), which makes it possible to estimate the project stability. The index shows mutual interest between CN partners and the coordinator. This index should be taken into account while taking decision about the final structure of the network and its application claims for fuzzy logic introduction. It makes it possible to increase the quality of decision-making about the CN configuration under the terms of uncertainty.

Collaborative Networs (CNs) enhance the preparedness of their participants to promptly form Virtual Organisations (VOs) that are able to successfully tender for large scale and distributed projects. However, the CN efficiency essentially depends on the ability of its managers to match and customise available reference models but often, also to create new project activities. Thus, given a particular VO creation project, the CN managers must promptly infer ‘what needs to be done’ (discover the project processes) and how to best communicate their ‘justified beliefs’ to the CN members involved. This paper proposes a framework for a decision support system that can help managers and enterprise architects discover/update the main activities and aspects that need to be modelled for various enterprise task types, with special emphasis on the creation of VOs. The framework content is also explained ‘by example’, in the context of a real-world scenario.