Abstract
Due to the increasing globalization process and the current economic situation, the power has shifted from the producer to the costumer, forcing companies to become more aware of the market needs. In order to become more customer-oriented, companies have been enhancing their management capabilities by shifting from a functional oriented approach to a process centered strategy, where core inter-firms processes can be seamlessly monitored and controlled. Since it is not possible to manage a system if its performance cannot be measured continuously during its entire life cycle, it is necessary to explore flexible and agile performance measurement and management systems as they are important tools capable of supporting the achievement of the strategic goals on the operational side. In the recent years several research projects have developed techniques and tools that support the collaboration. However they are restricted to the business level. In order to achieve the goals with the best performance, innovative and appropriate process monitoring and control mechanisms are needed. Consequently, this research provides an innovative solution that facilitates not only the gathering of operational and strategic information but also the assessment of collaborative manufacturing processes behavior following a fuzzy approach. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.

Abstract
Currently, performance analysis on complex manufacturing systems is performed in an ad hoc way since the main objective is to verify if the strategy designed has been helping companies achieve their targets following a reactive approach. However, more and more companies are performing in competitive markets, forcing them to become more proactive than reactive. This way, a simple approach is no longer suitable for this type of companies, and a stronger and effective interaction between the strategic and operational layers is key. Therefore, this research proposes a framework composed of both qualitative and quantitative methods that allow decision-makers to better understand their production system. Moreover, using key leading indicators as reference, the idea is to provide companies with the ability to anticipate future performance behaviors based not only on the knowledge acquired, but also on a mathematical tool that will synthesize this knowledge and infer future performance behaviors. This paper explores a critical issue for contemporary industrial organizations and sustainability issues concerning energy consumption. In this scope, an important research was performed aiming at modeling and understanding the normal behavior of electricity consumption, as well as the factors affecting energy consumption in the painting line of an automotive plant. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.

Abstract
Nowadays, business models play a key role in competitiveness. Each industry has specific needs regarding the customization of their business models. Through a personalized business model, organizations can enjoy a customized mapping of all the business activities. In the machinery industry domain and specifically producers of integrated Products and Services, the need for a customized business model has been growing due to the specifications of the industry. The existing business models do not satisfy the capital goods companies’ needs, therefore a study was conducted to analyze and understand companies’ specifications, the existing supporting business frameworks to further proceed with the creation of a new methodology and framework that supports the businesses of this specific industry.

Abstract
Knowledge is an important resource for organisations, and being able to manage it is a key factor for success. New information management and knowledge sharing approaches should be able to cope not only with possible variations in business situations and contexts, but also with various and sometimes discordant viewpoints, which are inherent to collaborative environments. Developing, reusing and maintaining common interpretations of available information is crucial to support real-word organisational activities. The particularly challenging problem of knowledge elicitation is tackled here combining terminological and knowledge representation views. A corpus-based conceptual modelling architecture was designed and discussed together with the workflows for real-time context retrieval and lexical pattern discovery. The practical implementation and validation of this work are accomplished on the ConceptME system, a platform developed as part of this research line, providing knowledge and terminological tools and resources to support activities that involve collaborative conceptualisation processes according to the ColBlend method.

Abstract
Due to its promising effects on the economic development, innovation networks have been recognized as an important instrument for the industrialization of regions and nations. Therefore, the creation of innovation networks has been fostered by national and regional innovation systems, as several EU nations are launching clustering and networking incentive programs. For example, the German Government initiated in 2002 an incentive program to foster the creation of innovation networks between SMEs, large enterprises, and research institutes. This research aims at identifying different strategies used in practice for the intentional creation of innovation networks by means of a multi-case study on a German enterprise that adhered to the German Government incentive in order to create nine networks during the past three years. Through this exploratory study, we were able to identify three distinctive strategies used by the network managers for the intentional creation of innovation networks: Cooperation Project, Partner Alignment, and Activity Alignment.

Abstract
This paper describes an action-research approach to the specification of an ontology to be applied in the information organisation of a community of forest planning experts. Like many others, a community of forest planning experts does not see their technical domains in unison, rather it voices several points of view that need to be shared and understood. This research started by addressing the practical problem of achieving an effective information structure and organisation for a semantic wiki platform. This was supported by a method and platform for the collaborative specification of ontologies: conceptME. Simultaneously, an empirical study was carried out aiming at understanding better how a technical community pragmatically develops conceptual representations of a domain. The results of this research show the benefits of collaboration in the development of conceptual models for knowledge organisation and information retrieval.