IT support for periods of group creativity in Virtual Enterprises

Within the life cycles of Virtual Enterprises, there are usually periods where representatives of different organisations collaborate in creative ways to set guidelines for the operational stages of the VE. Examples of what has to be agreed or negotiated include legal contracts, financial terms, human responsibilities, joint processes to be followed, common terminology, data formats and common software. This collaboration may be a mixture Of synchronous (physical or virtual meetings) and asynchronous activities. This position paper assesses the gap between what support is required and what is available in currently available tools, and suggests a number of key developments to the state of the art.