A proposed collaboration initiation for Europe-China joint venture formation

The rapid turnover of products/services obligates today's enterprises to develop new business strategies in order to deal with the associated pressures. One of the most common business strategies adopted by enterprises to handle these pressures is collaborative partnership. A collaborative partnership is a business arrangement that combines the distinctive capabilities of two or more enterprises. This type of partnership enables each participant to focus on their core competences, while sharing the external risks and uncertainties with their partners. The first step that enterprises undertake in forming collaborative partnerships is Collaboration Initiation. This is a process during which potential partners are sourced, evaluated and one or more are selected as a future business partner. This paper will show that currently there is no formal methods available for Collaboration Initiation, and in particular for European-Chinese Joint Ventures (JV). In the absence of formal methods mismatched partnerships are often initiated resulting in their failure and that of the ensuing transnational Concurrent Engineering (CE) activities. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a generic Collaboration Initiation process, which aims to support enterprises to select appropriate partners, which in turn supports transnational CE. European and Chinese JVs represent the transnational collaboration. The case for European and Chinese JVs will be used to represent transnational collaborations.