The formation of Virtual Organisations to address complex tenders through a Collaborative Commerce Marketplace

The modern complexity of engineered products has made it virtually impossible for a single company to be able to undertake all aspects of product design, marketing and delivery. Within military systems projects this is particularly true, where procurement cycles can thus stretch to several decades. To tackle this issue, this paper presents a model for a Collaborative Commerce Marketplace (CCM) using a case material from a successful CCM in the UK. The CCM model focuses on describing what SMEs (Small to Medium sized Enterprises) can do, allowing them to find partners and to respond to complex new enquiries for work. The CCM architecture incorporates a Virtual Breeding Environment encouraging the formation of Virtual Organisations driven by business opportunity. A case study is introduced which illustrates how a new Virtual Organisation was formed using a CCM to address a complex competitive MoD (Ministry of Defence, UK) tender call.