Belbin sees Bioteams as the next step. Dr R Meredith Belbin, regarded as the father of "team-role" theory and one of the worlds foremost experts on teams predicts that we will evolve into bioteam forms. In his book "The Coming Shape of Organisation" Belbin picks out five observations human teams need to learn from "a diminutive masterclass" of social insects such as bees, ants and termites.

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At a workshop today,19 Jan 2006, in Belfast entitled Legal Frameworks to support clusters and networks, Marco Conte of Collaborative Engineering (Rome) presented a unique set of Model Contracts developed by the EU Alive Project which provides detailed guidelines and templates covering the pre-contract, contract and post-contract aspects of collaboration for businesses cooperating in virtual networks and clusters.

Virtual entrepreneurs inhabit the hidden spaces in and between enterprises

Virtual teams are not just for corporate projects - there are numerous forms of virtual network, enterprise, community and cluster. One of the most interesting areas for the virtual team is in new enterprise development and entrepreneurship. Bioteams Guest Article by Ray Symmes.

The most common approach to business collaboration (Planned Collaboration) involves prior analysis of the participants to try to identify shared interests in collaboration (e.g. as complementary players in a collaborative supply network). Another more radical approach (Serendipitous Collaboration) involves putting a random mix of companies in a room and seeing what develops. Guess what - Serendipitous Collaboration works really well provided you have a good process for uncovering synergies!