Social Requirements for Virtual Organization Breeding Environments

The creation of Virtual Breeding Environments (VBE) is a topic which has received too little attention: in most former works, the existence of the VBE is either assumed, or is considered as the result of the voluntary, participatory gathering of a set of candidate companies. In this paper, the creation of a VBE by a third authority is considered: chambers of commerce, as organizations whose goal is to promote and facilitate business interests and activity in the community, could be good candidates for exogenous VBE creators. During VBE planning, there is a need to specify social requirements for the VBE. In this paper, SNA metrics are proposed as a way for a VBE planner to express social requirements for a VBE to be created. Additionally, a set of social requirements for VO planners, VO brokers, and VBE members are proposed.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

A survey of approaches to Virtual Enterprise Architecture: modeling languages, reference models, and architecture frameworks

As the theory and practice of enterprise architecture became mature, researchers and practitioners have started applying similar concepts and approaches to virtual enterprises. The virtual enterprise is a temporary coalition of enterprises joining hands to exploit a particular opportunity. Virtual Enterprise Architecture addresses a Virtual Enterprise holistically at a strategic level. This article provides a definition of Enterprise Architecture, Virtual Enterprise, and Virtual Enterprise Architecture and presents results from a study of six approaches to virtual enterprise architecture for virtual enterprises (NEML, CAML, AVERM, VERAM, BM VEARM, and ARCON)

Cooperation networks in the tourism sector: multiplication of business opportunities

Inter-organizational strategic alliances, in which networks of cooperation stand out, have proved to be a good model to provide more competitive organizations. However, there are still shortcomings concerning models and supporting technologies that help the creation of inter-organizational arrangements. This paper presents a conceptual model for the establishment of cooperation networks, an information system that supports the proposed model and, finally, the results of a case study in the tourism sector. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Domain of applicability of Value Analysis approach in the pre-selection of resources

For the project of an Agile/Virtual Enterprise (A/V E) the resources selection is a key factor. The output of the selection process should be prepared to guarantee quality, efficiency and cost-attractiveness, in order to ensure the agility and integrability of the A/V E. Despite the potential of Value Analysis (VA), none of the resources selection models found in the literature incorporates the VA integration. The main objective is to quantify the selection process performance with VA integrated into the pre-selection of resources in accordance with the developed model. The paper presents through the simulation results analysis, some of the benefits of VA application: greater applicability domain for candidate resources and number of tasks; and reduction of the selection time.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Crowdsourcing innovation intermediaries Functions

Open innovation is a hot topic in innovation management. Its basic premise is open up the innovation process. The innovation process, in general sense, may be seen as the process of designing, developing and commercializing a novel product or service to improve the value added of a company. The development of Web 2.0 tools facilitates this kind of contributions, opening space to the emergence of crowdsourcing innovation initiatives. Crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing not directed to other companies but to the crowd by means of an open call mostly through an Internet platform. Innovation intermediaries, in general sense, are organizations that work to enable innovation, that just act as brokers or agents between two or more parties. Usually, they are also engaged in other activities like inter-organizational networking and technology development and related activities. A crowdsourcing innovation intermediary is an organization that mediates the communication and relationship between the seekers – companies that aspire to solve some problem or to take advantage of any business opportunity – with a crowd that is prone to give ideas based on their knowledge, experience and wisdom. This paper identifies and analyses the functions to be performed by an intermediary of crowdsourcing innovation through grounded theory analyses from literature. The resulting model is presented and explained. The resulting model summarizes eight main functions that can be performed by a crowdsourcing process, namely, diagnoses, mediation, linking knowledge, community, evaluation, project management, intellectual property governance and marketing and support. These functions are associated with a learning cycle process which covers all the crowdsourcing activities that can be realized by the broker

Crowdsourcing Innovation Intermediaries Functions

Open innovation is a hot topic in innovation management. Its basic premise is open up the innovation process. The innovation process, in general sense, may be seen as the process of designing, developing and commercializing a novel product or service to improve the value added of a company. The development of Web 2.0 tools facilitates this kind of contributions, opening space to the emergence of crowdsourcing innovation initiatives. Crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing not directed to other companies but to the crowd by means of an open call mostly through an Internet platform. Innovation intermediaries, in general sense, are organizations that work to enable innovation, that just act as brokers or agents between two or more parties. Usually, they are also engaged in other activities like inter-organizational networking and technology development and related activities. A crowdsourcing innovation intermediary is an organization that mediates the communication and relationship between the seekers – companies that aspire to solve some problem or to take advantage of any business opportunity – with a crowd that is prone to give ideas based on their knowledge, experience and wisdom. This paper identifies and analyses the functions to be performed by an intermediary of crowdsourcing innovation through grounded theory analyses from literature. The resulting model is presented and explained. The resulting model summarizes eight main functions that can be performed by a crowdsourcing process, namely, diagnoses, mediation, linking knowledge, community, evaluation, project management, intellectual property governance and marketing and support. These functions are associated with a learning cycle process which covers all the crowdsourcing activities that can be realized by the broker

The Innovation Public Policies and the Firms’ adoption of Innovative Processes - A New Methodological Approach for Evaluation

Today, innovation is present in the discourse of politicians and business leaders. They see innovation as a positive value and as a solution to solve social problems and company’s competitiveness, so organizations are encouraged to adopt innovative practices through incentives and innovation policies. Several economic and sociological studies have shown that Portuguese companies adopt more easily technological innovations (with short-term effects) then organizational and social innovations. In this sense, we will consider innovation public policies effects at Portuguese companies and how they take available opportunities for innovation. The aim is to know if the concept of innovation spread by these policies is multidimensional (eg social, economic and technological) or restricted. We propose to study the factors (internal and external) that affect innovation processes in enterprises through case studies methodology. This research strategy will show us the processes of innovation from within the organizations and analyze the socio-economic context in which organizations operate through a new methodological approach for evaluation.Innovation, Innovation Systems, Public Policies, Enterprises, Territory.

Manufacturing system and enterprise management for Industry 4.0: Guest editorial

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) represents a significant step in the processes transformation in practically every industry, where the smart concept emerges in autonomous decisions and cyber-physical systems based production systems [1]. The role played by the usually referred technological pillars of I4.0 (such as internet of things (IoT), horizontal and vertical system integration, simulation, autonomous robots, big data and analytics, augmented reality, additive manufacturing, cloud computing and cybersecurity), based on technological advancements (mainly Information and Communications Technology (ICT)), in adhering to I4.0, are well known by the industry and academia (attending the huge number of research papers available), and have being implemented with more or less success. Notwithstanding the significant expected opportunities and impact of the fourth industrial revolution identified by researchers, experts are not convinced that the changes will be as significant as forecasted [2 - 4]. According to [5], only rare and recent attempts to understand the critical success factors of I4.0 implementation in manufacturing companies can be found in literature. A few recent studies reviewed in [5], point out that some of the critical factors are related to the management for I4.0. Cumulatively, the research in the field of management for I4.0, is still scarce, compared with the research on technologies for I4.0. The title of this Special Issue “Manufacturing System and Enterprise Management for Industry 4.0” is aligned with that concern and its content should be seen as a contribution to overcome management deficit problem of I4.0 implementation success. Nowadays, the challenges are related to the way how I4.0 is implemented and managed, in order to achieve the desired outcomes, economic, environmental, and social.First, our acknowledgments and greatest thanks go to Professor Bosko Rasuo, Editor-in-Chief of the FME Transactions, for his highest support and professionalism and, more importantly, his highest collaboration, understanding and patience during the development of this Special Issue. Next, our acknowledgments go to the authors, for their contributions and collaboration, and to the reviewers, for their great effort during the review process and for the suggestions they provided to the authors. Acknowledgments go also to our institutions, University of Minho and Polytechnic of Porto, and to the Research centres within which this project on this Special Issue has been developed, namely to ALGORITMI Research Center of the University of Minho and INESC TEC - Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science. The guest editors want to acknowledge as well that this work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Collaborative Work Concept and the Information Systems Support: Perspective for and from Manufacturing Industry

Most of the discussion and controversy on organisation of work concepts has been referenced to the manufacturing industry along the 20th century: it started with the concept of “scientific management” from Taylor, and continued with the new ideas on the importance of human factors as Mayo pointed out in the 1930s. Immediately after the 2nd World War Friedmann studied the human problems related to new manufacturing technologies and automation. And the late 1950 and 1960s were decades of strong debate on the socio-technics with the research at Tavistock Institute of London and the emergence of national programmes on new forms of work organisation. At the end of the last century the concept of collaborative work was developed together with the definition(s) of information systems and organisational design. However, the interest came from other production activities, like the services. This article analyses the approaches developed on these debates on the collaborative work and information system and its application to the manufacturing industry