Automating trust assessment for configuration of temporary partnerships

Owing to advances in digital technology, emerging breakthrough solutions responding to market needs are becoming increasingly innovative and complex. Large amount of resources, competencies, skills, etc. are required to accomplish such solutions, usually beyond the capabilities and capacities of a single organization. The emergence of co-innovation networks as breeding environments for creation of temporary partnerships has enhanced the possibility of success for organizations and facilitating their collaborations. One obstacle to configuration of such partnerships as well as collaboration has been the difficulty in assessing the trust level of potential partners. So far, trust level assessment has been performed manually by organizations and in ad hoc manners, which is both time consuming and hardly produces accurate results. Consequently, formation of collaborative initiatives has become more challenging and organizations are reluctant to work with each other. This paper addresses the supervised automation of the assessment of trust level of organizations in co-innovation networks. It presents the design and development of Trust Management system, addressing its specifications and architectures to facilitate its implementation.