Exploitation of business opportunities: The role of the virtual enterprise broker

In the Framework for Global Virtual Business proposed by the COSME network, a Virtual Enterprise Broker and Virtual Industry Clusters form a Virtual Organisation. The main objective of a Virtual Organisation is to create Virtual Enterprises to exploit business opportunities identified by the Virtual Enterprise Broker using core competencies deployed from partners from different Virtual Industry Clusters. Virtual Enterprise Brokers (VEB’s) will need to do much more than just the identification of market needs. The VEB is in charge of identifying, selecting and qualifying best partners for the Virtual Enterprise. Also the responsibility will be to manage the partners’ competencies. The objective of this paper is to propose a business model to exploit global business opportunities by VEB based in four main processes: ideation, basic development, advanced development and launching. These four main processes will describe all the activities and tasks that should be performed by the VEB’s in order to fulfil market requirements successfully through the Virtual Enterprise concept. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate how the VEB using a Virtual Industry Clusters share and deploy companies’ competencies in other to satisfy market demands.