Thanks to Cory Sorice for pointing me to an article, Heres an idea: Let everyone have ideas, in the New York Times, March 26 which reports on Rite-Solutions a technology company who have created a vigorous marketplace for ideas inside their company in what Tim O’Reilly calls an “architecture of participation”.

One of the biggest issues facing collaborative business networks is what legal form they should take. Too loose and they lack accountability and robustness but too tight and they become hamstrung and inflexible. Enter the Unincorporated Association and the Consortium Agreement.

One of the Ten Trends to watch in 2006, according to the McKinsey Quarterly (Jan 2006), will be the emergence of new global structures with a barbell-like structure, with a few giants on top, a narrow middle, and a flourish of smaller, fast-moving players on the bottom.

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.

A CMM for collaborative networks

Over the last year months a group of cluster facilitators and network coaches in Northern Ireland, including myself, have been working under the auspices of the Cluster Facilitators Forum, to try and develop a non-proprietary open model to guide how collaboration can develop between businesses through clusters and networks.

I presented "Virtual Enterprise Networks - A proven network partnering model for SMEs" at the 14th National Quality Conference in Istanbul, Turkey on Thursday November 17, 2005.

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

As a facilitator I do a lot of work with groups of small businesses who say they are interested in "collaborating as a network" (whatever that means). The conventional approach to working with such a group is to first build some trust, exchange company information and then start exploring collaboration possibilities. The problem is that this approach does not really work!

If you want to innovate you must first learn to collaborate

A couple of years ago I co-authored a major report for Forfas (the Irish national policy advisory board for enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation) on Innovation Networks under the overall editorship of Tom Martin.

Levelling the playing field for UK SMEs

In an article, UK SMEs Get Green Light from Government, published Friday 9 September 2005, the UK eGov monitor Newsdesk reports that public sector buyers now require 'good reason' not to use smaller suppliers.