Partner Relationship Management

Abstract

R&D activities normally require consortium formation due to the different areas of expertise involved in such activities. On the one hand, it is not trivial for a R&D entity to decide in which projects it should participate, or which are the adequate partners to form a consortium. On the other hand, acceptation of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems has become a reality for the industry and researchers in areas, such as marketing, communication, or computer science. These tools contain in their basic packages features to manage key company actives, including partners and clients. However, R&D environments involve special characteristics and traits, which require an extension of functionalities in order to be accurately covered. The increasing strength and usefulness of semantic technologies have led to innovative decision support processes and management of partners and R&D call for proposals. This work introduces an architecture that integrates R&D processes with the CRM philosophy.