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Byline: Kati Jarvi, Liisa-Maija Sainio, Paavo Ritala, Antti Pellinen Value in the business model concept is traditionally described from the perspective of end-customers. We argue that this is not sufficient in today's competitive multichannel environment. We utilise a transactional perspective and extend the notion of exchange of value and resources to the firm's partners. The developed partnership business model construct is introduced and its usability to analyse interfirm cooperation related to provision of IP multimedia communication services is examined empirically. The goal is to find out why an operator would be a preferred channel for service delivery, and what would make their partnership business model attractive from the partners' perspective. The results suggest that partners evaluate the attractiveness of the business model of an operator in terms of value and resources. The partnership business model construct provides a valuable perspective to companies who have to consider how to attract good partners to stay competitive.

Byline: Kathy Babiak, Lucie Thibault Partnership management remains an underexplored area in academic literature, and empirical studies on the nature of interaction between organisations involved in relationships are few. This study empirically examined how multiple organisations in a cross-sectoral partnership used both formal controls and informal (social) processes to manage their relationships. This research employed qualitative methods to explore the extent to which both formal and informal processes were relied upon by individuals responsible for managing partnerships. Partnership managers in this study felt that formal controls such as defined objectives and strategies, division of costs, risks, and returns, and support and control mechanisms such as contracts and reporting structures limited interaction between organisations, and thus were not extensively employed. Participants reported that to a great extent, informal processes such as trust were used to ensure the effective interaction between organisations to allow the objectives of the relationship to be met. Recommendations for practitioners and future research are provided.

Byline: Sukhmani Kaur Mantel, Dennis Cheung, Richard Welford, Peter Hills Over the past decade, processes of environmental reform have been increasingly shaped by cooperative management between businesses, government and NGOs. This paper provides results of extensive interviews to assess cooperative environmental relationships between businesses and NGOs in Hong Kong and the barriers and positive drivers for these partnerships. Interviews with ten partnering NGOs found most optimistic about what has been achieved. Non-partnering NGOs interviewed were also hopeful about future partnerships. Overall, NGOs expressed the need for capacity building on governance issues, on negotiating partnerships and hope that business associations and government can provide necessary support. Issues of weak economy, business dominated thinking, weak civil society and lack of top-level commitment to environment need addressing. Comparison of small and large NGOs showed similar gains and surprisingly even similar types of partnerships. This study identified Seven Skills for Partnership Success to build on Plante and Bendell's Art of Collaboration.

The emphasis of this article is on approaches to service-related science-to-business collaborations. We show the experiences of three international consulting firms - Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, Siemens Business Services and IBM - in terms of service-related science-to-business collaborations. Based on these experiences, we identify several existing deficiencies in service-related science-to-business collaborations such as highly personalised organisation forms, divergent incentive systems, cultural barriers, and different time horizons. Furthermore, we describe requirements of service-related science-to-business collaborations, which can be structured into requirements based on aspects of content, and requirements based on aspects of structure.

Byline: Fikret Berkes, Tikaram Adhikari Does indigenous entrepreneurship have distinctive features? We explored resources used, benefits produced and nature of partnerships in 42 indigenous cases in the UNDP Equator Initiative database, mainly involving forestry, agro-forestry, agriculture, NTFPs, ecotourism and protected areas. The cases showed a strong focus on social enterprise and cultural values, and politics of resource access. Many indigenous groups sought control over their traditional lands as essential to rebuilding their societies, and indigenous entrepreneurship was often used as a tool towards self-governance. The cases were characterised by extensive networks, with a large number of partners at the same level of social and political organisation (horizontal inkages). Vertical linkages typically involved three or four levels of political organisation. These connections went far beyond business networking and included, for example, environmental knowledge building. Partnerships for training and institution building often involved NGOs or local-level government agencies or both, but rarely (N=2) non-indigenous joint ventures.

Byline: Jan Myers This paper considers the complexity of managerial work in the UK non-profit sector that can be particularly observed at the interface between for-profit and public sector organisations. This nexus of working and learning, which requires knowledge of and an ability to act and interact on a number of levels, comes together in a variety of partnership arrangements with public sector, non-profit and private sector agencies. Key questions are raised: how can this individual and collective learning outside the organisation both contribute to the success of partnership working and be transferred back into the 'internal' dimension of building the capacity of one's own organisation? Can active alliances of different organisations value the diversity of sector differences? How might the learning brought about by these arrangements be captured and harnessed and where does the ownership of learning processes and knowledge creation lie?

Byline: Stanley R.M. Oliveira, Osmar R. Zaiane The sharing of association rules has been proven beneficial in business collaboration, but requires privacy safeguards. One may decide to disclose only part of the knowledge and conceal strategic patterns called sensitive rules. The challenge here is how to protect the sensitive rules without losing the benefit of mining. To address this problem, we propose a unified framework that combines: a set of algorithms to protect sensitive knowledge; retrieval facilities to speed up the process of knowledge protecting; and a set of metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in terms of information loss and private information disclosure.