Business Community Management

This chapter on business community (BC) management presents the BUILD module of the Net-Challenge methodology whose objective is to provide the conceptual background and methodological guidance for organizations that want to create and manage BCs (BC building) that are supported by advanced information and communication technology (ICT) tools. The extensive use of social networking applications is promoted, including the applications developed by the Net-Challenge project and existing standard tools, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. These BCs are business environments that comprise a significant number of organizations (mostly small-and medium-enterprises (SMEs)), where trust is developed between its members and communication mechanisms are established. For each phase of the BC lifecycle, the conceptual background, methods, guidelines, best practices and business processes are proposed to support organizations implementing the activities and initiatives necessary to ensure the desired performance. © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.