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European Collaboration Networks

Obiettivo

With the move towards globalisation of economies, many organisations choose to compete by merging or acquiring competitors in their particular markets or in upstream or downstream business processes. ECOLNET proposes to validate a different business strategy that is suited to independent European SMEs, which have traditionally focussed on their national markets. This strategy develops the concept of collaboration through clustering of knowledge provided by different, independent organisations.
Groups of European companies exploiting the ECOLNET concepts and infrastructure will increase their market penetration through the creation of networks for co-operation and strategic business alliances. They will exchange knowledge, resources and products, and will complement their offer and local market with their allied networked partners.
ECOLNET will provide two concrete results to these actors: a model for building collaborative networks, and information systems to support exchange of business knowledge.
ECOLNET will validate its model and IT infrastructure in three Collaborative Networks:
Software and services allied companies, willing to exchange know-how on software development, products, applications and even personnel.
Human resource consulting companies, in the personnel placement/head-hunting market, wishing to exchange personnel and skills, and to complement their business opportunities.
The Object Management Group, an international organisation dedicated to the production of open specifications for the development of distributed interoperable object component systems, wishing to strengthen communication and collaboration between its associates.

Objectives:
ECOLNET has two objectives:
To provide a model or guidelines for building collaborative networks. Guidelines will be drawn-up for co-operation and integration of business processes between collaborative services companies and associations. It will be based on the conclusions of the three experiences implemented as a test-bed in ECOLNET.
To create an information system to support collaborative networks for business knowledge exchange. The system will provide integrated views of various co-operative facilities, including: an organisational system (information on the organisation, persons, contacts for specific items, procedures and business processes), a commercial system (containing information related to business needs, projects/solutions, and customer and market information), a technical documentation system (a knowledge database containing technological documents and multimedia objects which can be shared and exchanged) and a human resources database (containing information on the professionals of the organisations and their related skills).
The ECOLNET experience will be especially well suited for implementation:
As a corporate knowledge management system for large geographically distributed organisations;
As an extranet system for groups of companies with affiliates in different countries;
As a collaborative environment for business alliances or networks similar to those present in the project, especially for SMEs whose dimension and lack of appropriate knowledge and resources prevent them to reach other European markets by traditional channels.

These include clusters of knowledge built for exchanging specific technological issues, or research networks built around several Institutes and Universities;
As support for the interactions between different public administrations (local, regional, national and multinational);
As a general support to all persons or organisations willing to share knowledge.

Work description:
ECOLNET is divided into 3 phases:
Phase 1 - Definition of the business model for companies working in a network, independently of their business sector; procedures for providing a unique response to a market need; communication protocols; management aspects; the architecture of the infrastructure to support the model: information to share, management tools, characteristics of the network, access and security issues, user interface.
Phase 2 - Design and development of the system, integrating different components in an iterative way to produce intermediate results and assure relevance for the user organisations.
Phase 3 - Validation in three Collaborative Networks; testing of the effectiveness of ECOLNET, the information provided by the system, the usability of the tools developed to access and manage the information, and system performance.

The first task will be to populate the data structures and to define realistic scenarios in each networked organisation. The different scenarios will permit identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the whole model and its IT system, and refinement leading to potential export or transfer to other business sectors.

Invito a presentare proposte

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Meccanismo di finanziamento

CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Coordinatore

IBERMATICA S.A.
Contributo UE
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Indirizzo
Paseo mikeletegi 5
20009 San sebastian
Spagna

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Costo totale
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Partecipanti (6)