This volume presents the concurrent enterprise business model and concurrent enterprising approach, which is emerging as a crucial challenge for organizations in all geographical locations and economic sectors. To achieve this goal, the book deals with the main aspects of the emerging context in which enterprises are doing business. This context is characterized by the fastest-spread information and communication technologies (ICT) that constitute the new infrastructure of the global marketplace. The text discusses a set of the most advanced enterprise paradigms created during the 1980s and 1990s, most of them supported by advanced research programmes, especially in the worldwide manufacturing industry. It discusses differences between these enterprise paradigms and presents Internet-related technologies as a main driver toward a new business model. It then examines less theoretical questions, including how to implement this new business model and how companies can move to the concurrent enterprise paradigm in creating a concurrent business environment.The first chapters concentrate on the advanced enterprise paradigms, and their advantages and limits for maintaining or improving competitiveness in the global marketplace. Later chapters study, separately, the virtual enterprise and related approaches, and another fundamental ingredient of the new business model - concurrent engineering (CE). Further chapters summarize these preceding approaches and establishes a foundation for building a concurrent enterprise, and present specific business cases illustrating the advantages and limits of virtual enterprise applications and introducing electronic commerce and electronic documents. The final chapters present concurrent enterprise as a business model, and synthesize the concurrent enterprising process. This is a reference and a user's guide designed for business managers, IT managers, engineers, researchers, scientists, and other individuals interested in learning how to use a sustainable business model driven by the Internet and electronic commerce.
