Collaborative networks is a new scientific discipline that covers the study of networks consisting of a variety of entities (e.g. organisations and individuals) that are largely autonomous, geographically distributed and heterogeneous in terms of their operating environment, culture, social capital and goals, but that collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals (e.g. problem solving, production or innovation), and whose interactions are supported by computer network. Nowadays collaborative networks manifest in a large variety of forms. Moving from the classical supply chains format, characterised by relatively stable networks with well-defined roles and requiring only minimal coordination and information exchange, more dynamic structures are emerging in industry, science and services. Some of these organisational forms are goal-oriented, i.e. focused on a single project or business opportunity, such as the case of virtual enterprises. Others are long-term alliances established to facilitate the rapid formation of dynamic virtual organisations in response to business opportunities.
However, in spite of the promising trends and growing interest in establishing collaborative networks in industry, services and research, and the increasing establishment of pre-existence long-term alliances of organisations and/or individuals, to act as breeding environments for fluid configuration/reconfiguration and creation of the collaborative networks, in practice the success of their operation is quite challenging. In fact, the success rate of collaborative networks falls much shorter than the expectations, and various empirical studies have surprisingly shown that failure to achieve successful collaborations nearly reaches 50% of the cases.
This special issue addresses approaches and methods to support effective involvement and engagement of enterprises in industry collaborative networks. The success of collaboration requires better tuned reference models and frameworks, but also new mechanisms for readiness assessment, competence modelling, negotiation, value systems alignment, access to knowledge, etc. Within this context, this issue brings cutting-edge research carried out by some leading worldwide researchers in the area of collaborative networks. It gathers selected papers from the 9th IFIP International Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE’2008), held in Poznan, Poland. This selection tried to comprise work on different issues related to collaborative networks in a way readers can have a more comprehensive vision about the area and their applications. The selection was based on a reviewing process carried out by some experts in the area and the eight selected papers were further revised and extended.
The first paper, Competency modelling targeted on boosting configuration of virtual organisations, presents a comprehensive model to specify competencies of VBE member organisations via ontologies considering capabilities, capacities, costs and conspicuities. This model promotes more efficiency in VO formation, and thus increases organisations’ involvement in potential virtual organisations.
The second paper, Supporting production processes with lightweight platforms, applies concepts from complexity theory and social patterns to create a model to identify requirements for dynamic supply chains, converting models to lightweight implementations to support the required flexibility.
The third paper, Increased reliability in SOA environments through registry-based conformance testing of web services, presents a method for creating formal specifications to check whether the software systems that support the business processes of some collaborator actually behave as expected. This aims at having some guarantee in terms of the reliability of their prospective partners before committing to cooperation.
The fourth paper, A method to analyse the alignment of core values in collaborative networked organisations, introduces an approach based on causal models and graph theory for the analysis of core values alignment in collaborative networks, focusing on virtual organisations breeding environment. This provides some basis to align the different values of partners in order to improve co-working.
The fifth paper, Agreement negotiation support in virtual organisation creation–an illustrative case, presents a negotiation wizard to rapidly respond to business opportunities that might emerge and hence to create virtual organisations in a more agile way. Through this environment it should be possible to conduct and manage the VO negotiation process, reach agreements, enclose necessary documentation, specify partners’ right and duties, etc.
The sixth paper, Virtual organisation breeding environments toolkit: reference model, management framework and instantiation methodology, introduces a VBE reference model as a reference guide for the actors responsible for the creation and operation of breeding environments. As part of the VBE reference model, a VBE management framework is also introduced as a set of management activities and supporting tools to ensure that a VBE can fulfil all tasks required to achieve its objectives. This also includes a VBE instantiation methodology as a controlled process supported by different assisting methods and tools for establishing a VBE.
The seventh paper, Orchestrating networks in the biopharmaceutical industry: small hub firms can do it, discusses coordinating issues in networked organisations and the emergence of so-called dedicated coordinating firms. The work has been based on some case studies from the biopharmaceutical industry.
The last paper, Customising knowledge search in collaborative networked organisations through context-based query expansion, presents a comprehensive framework to support knowledge sharing and search within distributed and heterogeneous members of a CNO. The paper highlights the used ontologies and the smart way of searching, which are based on business contexts and semantics.
This issue is of relevance to researchers, scholars, practitioners and managers who are interested in understanding how enterprises can leverage their engagement in collaborative networks.
We would like to thank all the authors and referees for their contributions and work, making it possible to reach this high-quality compendium. As a result of this cooperative and distributed work, we hope that this issue will become a valuable material to all of those interested in the advances and challenges in the area of collaborative networks.
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