Systemic Strategic Management for VBEs in the Manufacturing Sector

The concept of Virtual Organisation Breeding Environment (VBE) is now understood as a fundamental entity to enable the formation of dynamic collaborative organisations especially Virtual Organisations (VOs). System theory fits well when dealing with dynamic and complex systems such as organisations. Therefore, the system theoretic or systemic view is adequate for analysing the internal and external challenges as well as the manoeuvring spaces for VBEs under dynamic circumstances. The VBE can be considered as a system of members who form a larger unit – the VBE itself – and which is embedded in a larger system, i.e. the market. The single members of a VBE which are normally companies can also be seen as (sub-) systems which build up the VBE. Strategic management has the function to identify the midand long-term objectives of the VBE including supportive strategic programmes (actions) to ensure the evolution of the network. Based on a requirements analysis of a theoretic VBE, this paper provides a short state of the art on systemic approaches used in strategic management of manufacturing enterprises and how they can be transferred to collaborative organisations like VBEs. The result is a proposal of a strategic management process for VBEs supported by systemic methods and tools.