Virtual Enterprises

Steadily growing competition has induced business enterprises to look for possibilities of adjusting their structures to present market challenges. In this context the idea of “going-virtual” is constantly mentioned. That there are limitations to such procedures, however, it is shown by the fact that up to now the number of such virtual enterprises and departments respectively is minimal. The co-operation of 16 IT and multimedia firms serves as an example to show up the preconditions of making practical use of the “virtual potential” at least to some extent. Occurring problems clearly show that any decision for or against virtualisation can only be made in individual cases.

The changing market situation due to growing globalisation, the development of new technologies, as well as the strong competition forces today’s enterprises to employ innovative strategies in order to maintain their competitiveness on national and international markets. Many companies respond to this challenges establishing cross national co-operations. This policy is also applied in the field of product development. Nevertheless it becomes clear that many problems of a product development between distant located collaboration partners are based on cultural differences. Hence balancing and adjusting cultural differences is of pivotal impor-tance for the success of the project type.