Creating a Collaborative B2B Environment in the Classroom: Evaluation of Methods Utilized in an International Simulation over a 4-Year Period

As businesses of the 21st century continue to expand their relationships with partners and customers enabled by information technologies, Universities need to prepare and expose students to the organizational and technical issues that enterprises encounter when developing business-to-business (B2B) systems. Understanding the issues and the ability to establish, develop, and manage B2B environments are skills needed in this 21st century spirit of eBusiness. This paper explains how to create and conduct a collaborative B2B environment in the classroom based on the experiences of a 4-year cooperative curriculum between two Universities. In addition, the analyses results of the collaboration methods utilized over that 4year period are presented. These results have implications on what collaboration methods may be or may not be successful in conducting a B2B simulation in your curriculum.