PRO-VE - IFIP/SOCOLNET Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises

Collaborative Networks emerged a decade ago, as a key issue for Economic growth and a very active area of scientific production. Dynamic collaborative organizations are an essential answer to the increasing need of strong adaptability to a constantly changing economic context. Several collaborative forms such as Virtual Organizations, Virtual Enterprises and other forms of Enterprise Networks, Professional Virtual Communities, or industry clusters and business ecosystems are now supported by large research and business practice communities. These new organizational forms put forth the development of a new theoretical background. In the recent years, many international projects have contributed to these scientific advances. The accumulated body of empiric knowledge and the size of the involved research community provide the basis for the foundation of a new scientific discipline on "Collaborative Networks". Such discipline is strongly multidisciplinary and thus PRO-VE Working Conference is designed to offer a major opportunity to mix contributions from Engineering, Economics, Managerial or Socio-Human communities.

Collaboration appears essential to achieve Sustainable Development. Sustainability requires conceiving new forms of collaboration at every level of the society. This endeavour emphasizes the multidisciplinary stakes of PRO-VE Conference: the economic dimension of collaborative networks has to adopt an enlarged vision of "territorial economy" where networking is essential; the socio-human focus of sustainable development is strongly linked to recent issues of collaborative networks e.g. on "Active Ageing", "Social Networks" or "Professional Virtual Communities" ; the ecological dimension is also linked to collaborative management of shared resources and large energy systems. New areas and patterns of collaborative behaviors are emerging, not only in industry, but also in the services sector, as well as in governmental and non-governmental organizations. Fundamentals of Collaborative Networks such as proper theoretical principles, management of collaboration risks and benefits, new value systems, adequate performance assessment methods, or trust establishment approaches, still represent important research challenges in formulating a sound theory for building inter-organizational collaboration.

PRO-VE, as the most focused scientific / technical conference in the area, offers a major opportunity for the presentation and discussion of both latest research developments and industrial practice case studies. Following the IFIP international mission, the PRO-VE conference offers a forum for collaboration among different regions of the world. This conference continues a series of successful conferences of PRO-VE'99 (Porto, Portugal), PRO-VE 2000 (Florianópolis, Brazil), PRO-VE'02 (Sesimbra, Portugal), PRO-VE'03 (Lugano, Switzerland), PRO-VE'04 (Toulouse, France), PRO-VE'05 (Valencia, Spain), PRO-VE'06 (Helsinki, Finland), PRO-VE'07 (Guimarães, Portugal), PRO-VE'08 (Poznan, Poland), PRO-VE'09 (Thessaloniki, Greece).