Collaborative Networks as a Mechanism for Strengthening Competitiveness: Small and Medium Enterprises and Non-state Actors in Tanzania as Cases

Industrial organizations are increasingly facing more challenges in the market and society. These challenges include the scarcity of resources, short delivery time requirement, frequent emergence of new technologies, demand for wide variety of competencies, and limited availability of up-to-date experts. Coping with these challenges requires continuous restructuring and managing changes in organizations. However, only large organizations can afford to institute these changes. It also requires continuous innovation in deployment of emerging technologies and management concepts. Thus, due to their small size, lack of competitive capital and inability to acquire complex opportunities, majority of SMEs and non state actors (NSA) find it difficult to cope with the required speed of change. However, both research and practice have shown that dynamic time/cost-effective and fluid creation of temporary collaborative networks wrought by ICTs is an enabler for the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and NSAs in quest of enhancing competitiveness in the marketplace. This article contributes to the understanding of the challenges related to the establishment of collaborative networks of organizations in developing economies and proposes a customizable model for establishing those networks.   Key Terms: Collaborative networks, developing economies, ICTs, SMEs, non state actors, collaborative capital &#160

Framework for a business interoperability quotient measurement model

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova da Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial (MEGI)Over the last decade the context of Interoperability has been changing rapidly. It has been expanding from the largely technically focused area of Information Systems towards Business Processes and Business Semantics. However, there exists a need for more comprehensive ways to define business interoperability and enable its performance measurement as a first step towards improvement of interoperability conditions between collaborating entities. Through extensive literature reviews and analysis of European Research initiatives in this area, this dissertation presents the State of the Art in Business Interoperability. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a model that closely captures the factors that are responsible for Business Interoperability in the context of Collaborative Business Processes. This Business Interoperability Quotient Measurement Model (BIQMM), developed in this dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to capture the key elements responsible for collaboration performance. Through the quantification of the relevance of each element to the particular collaboration scenario in question, this model enables a quantitative analysis of Business Interoperability, so that an overall interoperability score can be arrived at for enhanced performance measurements.Finally, the BIQMM is applied to a business case involving Innovayt and LM Glassfiber to demonstrate its applicability to different collaboration scenarios

A collaborative platform for an ambient assisted living ecosystem

The population ageing is a global trend that affects almost all countries in the world. The global share of people with 60 years or over is expected to reach 21.6% by 2050. The social and economic impact of this tendency is huge, creating new challenges to healthcare and social support services. Furthermore, population ageing is linked to an increased number of people with physical limitations together with the isolation of persons. The Ambient Assisted Living paradigm seeks to answer to some of this challenges through the integration of innovative technologies, products, systems and services. Aiming the development of an ecosystem of products and services for Ambient Assisted Living, the AAL4ALL project was created joining more than thirty research, academic and industry partners. During the AAL4ALL project a 3-layered model of services ecosystem was adopted for the conceptual architecture. This work presents a collaborative platform as a contribution to the top layer of the conceptual architecture - AAL Ecosystem.O envelhecimento da população é uma tendência global que afeta quase todos os países no mundo. A nível mundial, a percentagem de pessoas com mais de 60 anos deve atingir os 21,6% até 2050. Os impactos sociais e económicos desta tendência são enormes, criando novos desafios aos serviços de saúde e de assistência social. Além disso, o envelhecimento populacional significa um aumento do número de pessoas com limitações físicas bem como o seu isolamento. O paradigma de Ambient Assisted Living procura responder a alguns destes desafios através da integração de tecnologias, produtos, sistemas e serviços inovadores. Com o objetivo de desenvolver um ecossistema de produtos e serviços de Ambient Assisted Living, o projeto AAL4ALL foi criado reunindo mais de trinta parceiros das áreas académica, de investigação e indústria. Durante o projeto AAL4ALL, um modelo de ecossistema de serviços de 3 camadas foi adotado para a arquitetura conceptual. Este trabalho apresenta uma plataforma colaborativa como contributo para a camada superior da arquitetura conceptual – Ecossistema AAL

An environment to support negotiation and contracting in collaborative networks

During the last years, manufacturing and service industries faced a global change in the production paradigm. They have to continuously adapt their operating principles in reaction to new business or collaboration opportunities, where a natural reaction is a shift to a new business paradigm with the creation of strategic alliances for product or services development, but also for innovative and emergent business services design. On one hand, the process of creating such alliances can be rather simple if organizations share the same geographical and cultural context. But on the other hand, considering different conditions, there might be a low success rate in the creation of successful consortia. One known reason for such low rate are the delays resulting from negotiations in the establishment of collaboration commitments, represented by contracts or agreements, which are crucial in the creation of such alliances. The collaborative networks discipline covers the study of networks of organizations specially when supported by computer networks. This thesis contributes with research in this field describing the creation process of virtual organizations, and proposing a negotiation support environment to help participants in the negotiation of the consortia creation process and in the co-design of new business services. A negotiation support environment is therefore proposed and described with its main requirements, adopted negotiation protocol, conceptual architecture, models, and software environment. To demonstrate the feasibility of the implementation of the proposed systems, a proof-ofconcept software prototype was implemented and tested using some specific scenarios. This thesis work has been validated adopting a methodology that includes: (i) validation in the research community; (ii) validation in a solar industry network; and (iii) validation by comparison analysis

Enhancing General Contractors Capacities With Collaborative Networks

This research is motivated by considering new requirements of General Contractors (GC), resulted from modern day business environment and capabilities of Collaborative Networks (CN) to meet these requirements. GC should establish, manage and maintain an efficient network of suppliers and subcontractors to achieve complex construction project\u27s goals and guarantee the project performance. In recent years, complication and specialization of large projects of construction industry has led into wide recruitment of specialists contractors and, therefore, dividing projects into small segments. Thus, there is more emphasis on maintaining coordination between various sections and contractors, which will in turn guarantee the overall performance of a project. This paper will look at advantages of establishing CN to enhance capability and meet requirements of GC in Construction Projects. Concepts related to other knowledge areas such as Collaborative Networks are introduced, too. It is hoped that this will help in further research on developing the concept of CN in construction project management. The paper discusses similarities between GC and CN and possibility of establishing a coordinating part for GC, in the format of a virtual enterprise. The findings imply that most of the GC needs for becoming international and successful could be covered by Collaborative Networks’ specifications

The Role of Collaborative Networks in Sustainability

http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-642-15960-2#section=791431&page=1International audienc