REGIONAL VIRTUAL PLATFORMS SUPPORTING THE ENTERPRISES' COMPETITIVENESS AND THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The paper presents the ideas generated by a Romanian Research project "Knowledge management architecture in environmental, social and economic areas, designed to support the sustainable regional development strategy", financed under the national research budget. One major result of the project is represented by the development of a regional virtual platform as a driver for knowledge management and innovation. This virtual environment creates a space for integrating and articulating ideas and innovative solutions in a wide participative way. The platform represents an integrator and mediator for the regional business environment and main stakeholders, as well as a Connectivity channel for bridging other European and world networks and clusters. The global knowledge economy creates new challenges for the industrial space from at least two perspectives: tire development of knowledge products and services, and the increased enterprises' connectivity through complex networks integrating dynamic clusters. The enterprises have to cope with the quick technological changes, with complex organizational systems and with global networking requirements. Consequently, the major enterprise's needs focus oil innovation, in order to increase competitiveness in a sustainable way. In this context, the increased accessibility to the new technologies and innovative solutions, as well as the capacity to generate knowledge and innovation represent the major intangible assets of the global enterprise. The most of the industries, including the metallurgy, are already connected in networks of organizations, technologies, products and consumers, ensuring their visibility, and interactions oil the market. The capacity of increasing the partnerships and various associations represent a major success factor of the actual global enterprise. In the same time, the enterprises are concerned more about the global perspective than about the local one, and consequently have not always strong links with the local development. In this new perspective, the research team identified the gap between the local administration and the regional actors related to the sustainable regional development and proposed the rise of advanced ICT tools for creating a regional virtual platform for supporting the networking among the regional stakeholders and facilitating the development of regional knowledge base, for the benefit of the regional sustainable development. In this perspective, the business actors are more sensitive to the local environmental, economic and social issues, and could contribute to the regional strategy design, as main regional stakeholders. In the same time, the business area will take advantage of the open access to valuable regional knowledge repository and to other platforms, such as digital business ecosystems European platform.