Breaking the MBA delivery mould: A multi-group international MBA / practitioner virtual collaborative project

The marketing education project presented here brings together a major UK financial institution in the banking sector and a selection of its high value clients (B-to-B) via e-mail, telephone, video conferencing and other web-based technologies, with two geographically dispersed MBA classes in the UK and the US. Student groups were set up in virtual teams to target critical customer issues, analyzing gaps in the client-company interface. The two MBA courses included Customer Management & Quality Systems delivered at the University of Manchester, Manchester Business School (UK) and International Marketing, delivered at Missouri State University (US). The groups worked as a "think tank" collaborating to solve important customer service issues

MANAGING CROSS-CULTURAL ONLINE COMMUNICATION IN MULTICULTURAL PROJECT TEAMS: THE CASE OF CULTOUR+ PROJECT

The paper aims to present the process and partnership building in multicultural project teams through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) taking into account the Cultour+ communication project management plan to build virtual teams. CULTOUR+  is a Strategic Partnership (SP) of universities, local governments, SMEs and NGOs, that following the mainlines of the Higher Education Modernization Agenda, will offer high quality and innovative courses and tools, integrating innovation, international mobility and cross-border cooperation to enhance capacity building in higher education curricula in the fields of cultural tourism and hospitality, cultural management and shared cultural heritage.  This paper aims to enhance the effective use of ICT in project work by analyzing the way it fits in with various project activities having as an example the Cultour+ project. This approach may facilitate the choice of appropriate tools by each project team and show how ICT can support key processes like leadership, management, communication and co-operation within other European project teams

Virtual teams: a new opportunity to develop a business

Virtual teams give many advantages to organizations, including increased knowledge sharing and improve organizational performance. Virtual teams have altered the expectations and boundaries of knowledge worker?s interactions and make a new opportunity to develop the business. In this paper, we present summary results of an online survey. The online questionnaire was emailed by using a simple random sampling method to 356 Malaysian manufacturing small and medium ?sized Enterprises (SMEs). The findings of this study show that SMEs in Malaysia are gaining to use virtual teams, and it can be concluded that virtual teams provide a new platform for developing the business in SMEs. Based on the study, we suggest avenues for future research that are important to advancing our understanding of virtual team effects on business growth

SMEs; Virtual research and development (R&D) teams and new product development: A literature review

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are indeed the engines of global economic growth. Their continued growth is a major subject for the economy and employment of any country. Towards that end, virtual research and development (R&D) could be a viable option to sustain and ease the operations of SMEs. However, literature shows there has not been a great deal of research into the diverse characteristic of virtual R&D teams in SMEs. This article provides a comprehensive literature review on different aspects of virtual R&D teams collected from the reputed publications. The purpose of the literature review is to provide an outline on the structure and dynamics of R&D collaboration in SMEs. Specifying the rationale and relevance of virtual teams, the relationship between virtual R&D team for SMEs and new product development (NPD) has been examined. It concludes with identifying the gaps and feebleness in the existing literature and calls for future research in this area. It is argued to form of virtual R&D team deserves consideration at top level management for venturing into the new product development within SMEs

Virtual R&D teams in small and medium enterprises: a literature review

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the driving engine behind economic growth. While SMEs play a critical role in generating employment and supporting trade, they face numerous challenges, the prominent among them are the need to respond to fasting time-to-market, low-cost and rapid solutions to complex organizational problems. Towards that end, research and development (R & D) aspect deserves particular attention to promote and facilitate the operations of SMEs. Virtual R & D team could be a viable option. However, literature shows that virtual R & D teaming in SMEs is still at its infancy. This article provides a comprehensive literature review on different aspects of virtual R & D teams collected from the reputed publications. The purpose of the state-of-the-art literature review is to provide an overview on the structure and dynamics of R & D collaboration in SMEs. Specifying the foundation and importance of virtual teams, the relationship between virtual R & D team and SMEs has been examined. It concludes with the identification of the gaps in the existing literature's and calls for future research. It is argued that setting-up an infrastructure for virtual R & D team in SMEs still requires a large amount of engineering efforts and deserves consideration at top level management

Group Maintenance Behaviors in the Decision-Making Styles of Self-Organizing Distributed Teams

Businesses, universities, and other organizations are increasingly reliant on self-organizing, distributed teams which are enabled by information and communication technologies (ICTs). However, inherent geographical, organizational, and social limitations of ICTs challenge the relationships necessary for groups to make effective decisions. Understanding how group maintenance plays out within the context of different styles of decision making may provide insight into social tactics undertaken in such teams. Group maintenance is defined as discretionary, relation-building behavior that enables group members to trust and cooperate with one another more easily [1]. Decision style refers to the extent to which group decision making involves a broad contribution from group members other than leaders. It may range from the most autocratic style where a decision is made by one or a few individuals, to truly collaborative where every member has the opportunity to affect the decision. This study examines group maintenance within decision-making behaviors of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams as examples of distributed teams. Most FLOSS software is developed by such teams that are both dynamic and self-organizing, comprised of professionals, users, and other volunteers working in a loosely coupled manner [2-4]. These teams are nearly entirely virtual in that developers contribute from around the world, meet face-to-face infrequently (if at all), and coordinate their activities primarily through computer-mediated communications (CMC) [6, 7]

New Product Development in Virtual Environment

Purpose - The literature on the topic has evolved exponentially since eight years ago. Relaying on a review of studies published in recent years, this article proposes and discusses a framework which incorporates a set of virtual teams involved in a new product development initiative. Design/methodology/approach – A range of academic and practitioner literature related to virtual teams and virtual new product development is reviewed. What is Virtual New Product Development and what determines its development in manufacturing firms? These two questions are answered. Findings - The decision to use a virtual team is often a necessity and not a choice; being ‘virtual’ is in most cases not an alternative but a requirement. Enterprise may benefit from building and maintain the virtual teams in a number of ways such as achieving higher quality, accessing and capturing dispersed knowledge and skills regarding the multifunctional and multi-use components and modules, electronically unite experts in highly specialized fields, collaborating more productivity at a distance, achieving tight schedules and start quickly, reducing travel time and cost, enabling the recruitment of talented employees, builds diverse teams, promoting proactive employment and finally reducing discrimination in enterprises. Originality/value - The results of an academic literature review were employed to the literature so far has not paid adequate attention to the virtual team activities in NPD. The results highlight several avenues which would help managers and policy makers to better foster cyber new product development and designers to better channel of their efforts in the design and manufacturing domain.Keywords - New product Development; Virtual teams; Concurrent Collaboration; Review paper

A market based approach for resolving resource constrained task allocation problems in a software development process

We consider software development as an economic activity, where goods and services can be modeled as a resource constrained task allocation problem. This paper introduces a market based mechanism to overcome task allocation issues in a software development process. It proposes a mechanism with a prescribed set of rules, where valuation is based on the behaviors of stakeholders such as biding for a task. A bid process ensures that a stakeholder, who values the resource most, will have it allocated for a limited number of times. To observe the bidders behaviors, we initiate an approach incorporated with a process simulation model. Our preliminary results support the idea that our model is useful for optimizing the value based task allocations, creating a market value for the project assets, and for achieving proper allocation of project resources specifically on large scale software projects