Maintaining dynamic product designs to enable effective consortium building in virtual breeding environments

The potential of a Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE) is the ability to design and to realise innovative, customized products by selecting and integrating for each order the worldwide leading partners. To exploit this potential, it is too late to configure the consortium and to search for partners on the basis 0?an already specified bill 0?material: Co-operation has already to take place with the product-idea, where possible contributions to the planned end-product must be identified while concretising the bill of material. Only in this way, the VBE is able to benefit from the expertise of all potential partners and to ensure that the expertise of the planned consortium is also synchronised with the needed capabilities .for the requested end-product. In this paper, a method to support the building of consortia within the VBE on the basis open product designs will be highlighted. The method starts from an end-product and collects possible contributions from potential collaboration partners. © 2007, Springer New York LLC. All rights reserved.