Enterprise Networks for Competences Exchange: A Simulation Model

Abstract

A business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business and related to improving organizational processes. Process innovation can happen at various levels: incrementally, redesign of existing processes, new processes. The knowledge behind process innovation can be shared, acquired, changed and increased by the enterprises inside a network. An enterprise can decide to exploit innovative processes it owns, thus potentially gaining competitive advantage, but risking, in turn, that other players could reach the same technological levels. Or it could decide to share it, in exchange for other competencies or money. These activities could be the basis for a network formation and/or impact the topology of an existing network. In this work an agent based model is introduced (E3), aiming to explore how a process innovation can facilitate network formation, affect its topology, induce new players to enter the market and spread onto the network by being shared or developed by new players. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.