Collaborative networked organizations: Status and trends in manufacturing

Collaborative networked organizations represent an important paradigm to help manufacturing companies cope with the challenges of market turbulence. Through collaboration, assisted by ICT, companies extend their reach ability space and participate in agile value creation networks. After a brief summary of the main concepts and collaborative forms, this article presents a survey of the recent advances and suggests main research challenges for various focus areas. A list of emerging collaborative forms in different domains and their characterization are introduced. Among these forms, the customer involvement in innovation networks is discussed as a particularly relevant example for manufacturing. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.