Leading a virtual business network requires different skills than leading a traditional team. Many of these skills are unfortunately very counter-intuitive due to the living, evolving nature of such networks. Discovering this 'on the job' is almost as crazy as training airline pilots without using flight simulators!

In a new book, From Global to MetaNational, Strategy experts and Insead Professors, Yvez Doz, José Santos and Peter Williamson argue that the future form of successful global enterprise has now changed from the multinational to the metanational.

Here is a collection of my 7 most popular articles on collaborative and virtual business networks based on user feedback and page views:

Andrew Faughy, General Manager and Director of VEN Operations Ltd, gives an excellent video lecture ‘VEN: The Story so Far’ at the ICE Conference (Milan 2006) on the Virtual Enterprise Network concept in practice in Yorkshire in the UK involving nearly 400 small businesses.

I recently presented "Virtual Enterprise Networks - A proven network partnering model for SMEs" at the 14th National Quality Conference in Istanbul, Turkey. Heres the full presentation.

Harvard Professor Marco Iansiti predicts that the future business competition will not be between companies or even supply chains but between networks.

All collaborative business networks are not equal: some are solid networks, some are genuinely trying to get there and some are mere networks of convenience.

In the US there has been a movement particularly within the defense and advanced engineering sectors to try to develop more agility in supply chains by working differently with suppliers.

InterTradeIreland have just published a major (80 page) report Business Networks on the Island of Ireland which proves that networks and clusters are very much alive and growing in Ireland.

Foresight 2020 is a new research report (downloadable free) written by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Cisco Systems, assesses likely changes to the global economy, to eight major industries and to corporate structures over the next 15 years.