A Competence-Based Collaborative Network: The West Midlands Collaborative Commerce Marketplace

We present a competence-based collaborative network, the West Midlands Collaborative Commerce Marketplace (WMCCM) that was successfully employed to gain new business opportunities for SMEs in the West Midlands region of the UK. The competence profiling methodology employed places an emphasis on what SMEs are capable of doing rather than what products they make. This generates an increased number and wider range of enquiries to the SME. Further, a combination of tender feeds classified by semantic analysis of the tender requirements matched to the SME capability with a novel partnership formation function generates higher level systems type opportunities for these SMEs, which they would have been unable to undertake on their own. The paper discusses the functionality of the WMCCM using a case study to demonstrate its functionalities with reference to the I-BPM framework from the ECOLEAD project. It also highlights the roles in managing competence exchanges in collaborative networks as well as providing a common infrastructure for businesses to launch and operate their virtual organizations.