Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Designing and managing an effective corporate governance structure for Virtual Breeding Environments (VBEs) is a challenging process. Therefore, a governance model is required to define operational rules, bylaws and principles that will govern the behaviour of the members of a VBE during its life cycle. VBE governance will help to define who can make what decisions, who is accountable for which effects, and how each of the VBE actors must work to operate the VBE management process effectively. This paper presents first attempts in the definition of guidelines for Governance Rules and Bylaws in VBEs.

A Technological District (TD) is a form of Collaborative Network in a limited geographical area, where a variety of economic entities (enterprises, research centres, public administrations) are involved in high-intensive research activities and distributed scientific-technological processes, including knowledge sharing and technological innovation.In this paper, we hypothesize a TD scenario where a Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE) defines main working and sharing principles in order to enable collaboration between its members. One important goal is that of increasing chances and preparedness of TD members in the constitution of Virtual Organizations (VOs). We introduce a VBE organisational framework for a TD and we propose an approach to identify configurations of a VO addressed to cany out an innovation project.

Classical organization of work does not support the nowadays needs of global market, competition and knowledge intensive economy anymore. The problem is how to maintain and develop the competitiveness at the global level. The article discusses global trends, new theoretical concepts, related problems and questions with some practical examples.

In both developed and developing countries, different initiatives are carried out to motivate organisations, mainly companies, to network in new collaborative environments for innovation. In many cases these different initiatives have been promoted by Universities where academic researchers play a very important role by diffusing these networking concepts to local SMEs and by carrying out applied projects to coach firms in the formation of these new collaborative environments. In some occasions, Universities can also join the network to transfer new knowledge during the new product/service development process. The Virtuelle Fabrik and Swiss Microtech in Switzerland and the TeNeT group in India are three successful collaborative environments located in very different settings where the local University has played and still plays an important role for the collaborative environments’ continuous evolution and improvement. Therefore, the objective of this paper is twofold: 1) to assess the University key role for developing new collaborative environments and 2) to propose a methodology to benchmark the different initiatives in Universities to develop new collaborative environments.

This paper proposes a new method for managing the use of ontologies in the context of a Virtual Breeding Environment. This research work focus is on the dissolution phase of a Virtual Enterprise or Collaborative Network, where ontology segmentation techniques are user to enrich the VBE’s ontology library. Firstly, an overview of the process of ontology composition and decomposition is given and the ontology library system adopted described. Then, the ontologies’ ranking and classification method is described, explaining a set of metrics inspired in social network approaches. Finally, the results of preliminary tests are discussed.

Virtual Organisation Breeding Environments (VBEs) are known as an enterprise network creating virtual organisations (VOs) on occurring business opportunities. Whereas a VO is created dynamically with a limited time horizon, such a VBE is created for medium or long-term existence. Thus, a VBE needs besides operational also strategic planning.Strategic planning for organisations is a topic since the 50ies of last century, but research in the application to networked organisations is very limited. This paper analyses strategic issues, which might occur for VBEs in difference to not-networked organisations followed by the description of an approach, how strategic planning in a VBE could be supported. This approach is based on causal cross-impact analysis and provides a modelling framework for strategic objectives and a simulation component to generate strategic scenarios.

One of the basic mechanisms of collaborative business networks is mediation. A literature review is presented that identifies meanings and roles of mediators. Based on the literature a framework is developed that can be used to describe and distinguish different types of mediator services. Core concepts of the framework are the value activities that mediators offer and the functional level of these activities with regard to market transactions. The framework uses the e3-value modelling approach to illustrate the value-creating mediator activities in a business network.

Computer assistance in the process of creation of virtual organizations (VO) is an important condition for the possibility of having truly dynamic VOs, in response to collaboration opportunities in fast changing market contexts. A realistic approach to materialize agility in VO creation is defined with the assumption of a VO Breeding Environment (VBE) that guarantees the preparedness of its members to quickly get engaged in collaboration processes. A discussion of the process and a set of key functionalities towards a VO creation framework are presented in this context. The approach, architecture, and first results with such tools are described and challenges for future research are identified.

We have designed and implemented a software tool coFinder — a collaboration opportunity finder — aimed at facilitating the work of an opportunity broker in Collaborative Networked Organizations. It crawls the web to find potential collaboration opportunities (calls for tenders) and compares them with the actual competencies of companies from a Virtual organization Breeding Environment (VBE). The coFinder tool then structures, aligns and matches textual descriptions of calls for tenders with competencies and suggests a list of potential collaboration opportunities to the broker.

In the current fast-paced world, organizations do not have time to postpone ideas due to the lack of suitable technical and scientific supports that can help them in a rapid connection establishment in order to develop collaborative works. This paper presents a methodology that aids the user to find the appropriated performance indicators that may be used to compare and after to suggest a suitable set of organizations to fulfill a specific Collaboration Opportunity. In this work is made an assumption that the Virtual Organization Breeding Environment has a common set of performance indicators that are known and agreed among the involved organizations.