Organizations are transforming their relationships with their business partners. For example, instead of playing off dozens or even hundreds of competing suppliers against each other, many firms are finding it more profitable to work closely with only a small number of "partners". While these firms generally increase their amount of outsourcing, by focusing on a small number of partners they cr...

The concept of the virtual corporation, which describes a modern form of collaboration among organizations, was introduced in the scientific discussion in the mid 1990. Just recently virtual corporations have been closer described in numerous contributions. At the same time the topic of knowledge management became increasingly important in business studies. Especially the topic of the creation ...

The Esprit VISCOUNT project was formed by a consortium of European industrial and academic partners. It seeks to exploit emerging distributed object technologies to develop a Virtual Software Corporation (VSC) a geographically distributed software development environment populated with the next generation of CSCW software engineering tools. The central technical objective of the VISCOUNT projec...

Virtual corporations are seen as new organisational forms to ensure knowledge sharing and innovation. In this chapter the reason for the knowledge-creating competence of virtual corporations is explained. A shared identity and mutual trust of the participants are of paramount importance to innovation. Virtual corporations are in fact balancing on a tightrope. They have to create an identity whi...

Today's software tends to become more complex and is under competitive pressure, thus raising the need for new development practices. Strong geographical and organisational distribution in a Virtual Software Corporation seem to be a solution to many aspects, but leads to new problems as well. Software development is a knowledge intensive task. Geographical distribution makes effective knowledge...

The Virtual Corporation is a research initiative at Arizona State University that introduces multidisciplinary, concurrent-design techniques into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. Sponsored by the ARPA Technology Reinvestment Program and supported by industrial partners, The Virtual Corporation offers participants a unique opportunity to work with students from several academic discipli...

This paper describes a system that supports software development processes in virtual software corporations. A virtual software corporation consists of a set of enterprises that cooperate in projects to fulfill customer needs. Contracts are negotiated in the whole lifecycle of a software development project. The negotiations really influence the performance of a company. Therefore, it is useful...