New Product Search and Development as a Trigger to Competencies Integration in Virtual Enterprises

Virtual Enterprises (VEs) are an appropriated cooperation alternative and a way of gaining competitive advantage for enterprises. In this context, a promising form to extend the formation process of VEs is performing new product search and development. This proposal is being developed in a Brazilian project called VIRTEC Virtual Organization of Technology. In order to develop Virtual Products, the partners competencies are described in a matrix that correlates the respective competencies of each one. Depending on the complexity caused by the wide number of members, this article proposes the implementation of a computational system to deal efficiently with all the required information for the Virtual Product development.