Virtual enterprise

A virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance of businesses that come together to share skills or core competencies and resources in order to better respond to business opportunities, and whose cooperation is supported by computer networks.

It is a manifestation of distributed collaborative networks. A virtual enterprise is a particular case of virtual organization.

Virtual enterprises have become increasingly common in the area of research and development, with often far-flung organizations forming alliances that amount to a "Virtual Research Laboratory." Vassiliou (2007) outlined a broad continuum of possible virtual laboratory relationships, ranging from relatively simple outsourcing by a central organization to tightly knit consortia of collaborating entities.

Several definitions include:

All of these definitions indicate some common characteristics summarized as:

Several European Union projects in the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development focused on virtual enterprises:

Another example of virtual enterprise is found in the United States Army Research Laboratory's Federated Laboratories, or "Fedlabs." These began in 1996, and represented close partnerships between ARL and several industrial and academic organizations, as well as various non-profit entities. The first three FedLabs were in Advanced Displays, Advanced Sensors, and Telecommunications. Each FedLab was a large consortium, with both an overall industrial leader and an ARL leader. The cooperative agreements forming the FedLabs were somewhat unusual in that the ARL was not a mere funder of research, but an active consortium participant.

An overview of related projects (up to 2005) can be found in a book by Camarinha-Matos et al. (2005).

Since 1999 the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and Society of Collaborative Networks (SOCOLNET) sponsored an annual conference called the Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE).

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