COLLABORATIVE NETWORKS AND THEIR BREEDING ENVIRONMENTS

Progress in collaborative networks continues showing a growing number of manifestations and has led to the acceptance of Collaborative Networks (CN) as a new scientific discipline.  Contributions to CN coming from multiple reference disciplines has been extensively investigated.  In fact developments in CN have benefited from contributions of multiple areas, namely computer science, computer engineering, communications and networking, management, economy, social sciences, law and ethics, etc.  Furthermore, some theories and paradigms defined elsewhere have been suggested by several research groups as promising tools to help define and characterize emerging collaborative organizational forms.  Although still at the beginning of a long way to go, there is a growing awareness in the research and academic world, for the need to establish a stronger theoretical foundation for this new discipline and a number of recent works are contributing to this goal.