Enterprise Innovation

1Business Innovation in Virtual Enterprise Environments

Virtual enterprises are temporary alliances of business organizations that come together sharing skills, knowledge, information and resources in order to better respond to business opportunities, and whose cooperation is supported by information technology (IT) platforms. This chapter is an introduction to business innovation in virtual enterprise environments.

1.1. Introduction

One of the most interesting aphorisms in innovation literature is, without doubt, “Change Or Die!”. Few people know that this sentence was actually an advertisement made by Electronic Design and was conceived in 1970; only in 2005 did it become the title, and the opening concept, of Alan Deutschman’s article “Change or Die” for the magazine Fast Company. In this article, talking about the contents of the previous IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook conference, Deutschman argued that science has shown that only one time out of nine, when faced with preventable conditions like heart attacks, are people able to change the environmental conditions and the style of their life.

Moving the point of view from people to companies, we realize that the situation is exactly the same: companies, too often, are very slow to react to changes in environmental conditions and, when the environment is related to their own market, the results could be fatal. History is full of situations in which large companies have failed to change, although all the signs of a change ...