The role of ICTs on enhancing collaborative capital in developing economies

Abstract

Organizations (private, public), large and small, are increasingly facing more challenges due scarcity of resources, short delivery time requirement, frequent emergence of new technologies, demand for wide variety of competencies, and limited availability of experts with required skills. Coping with these constraints requires continuous innovation in deployment of emerging technologies and management. However, due to their small size, lack of competitive capital and inability to acquire complex opportunities, majority of SMEs and non state actors (NSA) find it difficult to cope with this needed speed of change. It is even more challenging in developing economy such as in Tanzania larger foreign companies and international NSAs outcompete local ones. Instead SMEs and local NSAs seek other new approaches to remain competitive and in their operations. A strategy by these agents is collaboration within the networks of organizations by using ICTs. However, both research and practice has shown that dynamic time/cost-effective and fluid creation of temporary collaborative networks requires the preexistence of the long term strategic alliances. This paper aims at analyzing the current practices of collaborative networks in developing economies with exemplification of Tanzanian cases. It then addresses some challenges for configuring effective collaborative networks towards enhancing collaborative capital of SMEs in developing economies. The paper is based on a premise that once SMEs and NSAs collaborate successfully their efficiency will improve and the one of the outcomes would be to improve socioeconomic status of a number of stakeholders in developing countries. Thus the paper contributes to the understanding of the challenges related to the establishment of collaborative networks of organizations in developing economies and proposes a customizable model for establishing those networks.