Acceleration of technology evolution, customers' requests of agility in operations and rapid product development requires the supply chains to become more active and connected to attend clients and new markets. The chapter content is structured on three business use cases. The first section is related to the aerospace industry. The purpose is to identify the influence of quality and quantity of the supplier base in the innovation activities of aerospace companies participating in a cluster. Authors applied a framework based on factor analysis and multivariate linear regression to measure the impact of the quality and quantity of a set of suppliers. The second section is related to operation of Micro Finance institutions (MFIs). Authors design and propose a full-featured optimization framework based on a mixed integer programming model. They discuss the impact of the risk balancing and merits of the proposed model.