A framework for partner selection criteria in virtual enterprises for SMEs

Virtual enterprises that exist on the Internet are increasingly gaining attention from organisations due to global competition and accelerating changes in the business environment. In virtual enterprises, two or more organisations merge to collaborate for a short period in exploiting market opportunities in response to ever-changing customer demand. Finding the right partners to form a partnership is one of the primary problems in virtual enterprises. Numerous criteria for partner selection are given by researchers and each seems to be critical in its own setting. However, these criteria do not help organisations that wish to apply these criteria to their business collaborations as there are too many to be considered. As market opportunities move rapidly, organisations could lose their chances to pursue those opportunities due to the amount of time that is needed to consider all the criteria. There are two categories of criteria for partner selection - task-related and partner-related criteria. Nevertheless, the focus of this paper is on partner-related criteria. In order to help virtual enterprises particularly small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in the partner selection process, the main partner-related criteria will be identified. Ultimately, these criteria will be used to identify critical success factors (CSFs) that can be employed at the early stage of partner selection to ensure secure and future business collaboration.