Abstract
Ordinarily, companies contend with one another for competitive advantages. In recent years, however, information technology (IT) has made possible a new kind of organization beyond the frameworks of individual companies. In a joint research project, the Japanese automobile industry postulated a virtual company made up of actual companies in collaboration, and performed an experiment to see how well it would work. Reviewing the results of this experiment guides the considerations that would be important to such a project, and the IT constitution that would be required in order to manage it. In this paper I describe considerations important to the management of such a project; suggests a supporting communication infrastructur; describes the problems that arose during the project, and tells how the problems were dealt with. Considerations of the likely phases in the development of IT for sharing information among participating members, based on the IT constitution that was actually implemented for each phase in the project, those are analyzed as the problems that remain to be solved.
