Methodological support to establish a collaborative non-hierarchical business network for complex product manufacturing

Increasing demand on dynamic business network motivates manufacturing companies, especially small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to be collaborative for achieving potential market gains. This need can be fulfilled by forming non-hierarchical business network, where the partners integrate with each other after identifying specific business opportunity. This research focuses to demonstrate the methodological stages of enabling a virtual organisation within the European RTD project Net-Challenge. In this research, methodological support to identify and collect the business scenarios and basic requirements related with choosing appropriate partners, building trust and sharing valuable information among them are presented. The fundamental issues related to collaboration such as critical factors for partnerships, criteria for qualifying a potential partner, assessment of a partner are elaborated within the scope of this paper. The paper is concluded with presenting an empirical study of six case companies and the issues related to business collaboration are critically discussed.