1087 A New Way of Conjoint Added Value Generation in Collaborative Business Processes Dirk Werth Institute for Informatin Systems at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Germany N IntroductIon Nowadays, economic organizations are dramati- cally changing towards networked structures (Österle, Fleisch, & Alt, 2000). These are characterized by core competence specialized value units (Prahalad & Hamel, 1990) that intensively interact along the added value in order to cooperatively generate the intended product. This intensification of exchanges leads to strong, collaborative relationships (also called collaborative business (cf. Camarinha-Matos, 2002). In these structures, the generation of added value is highly distributed through the network. In this respect, the relationships between such enterprises are more is related to the output generation, it can be called a co-operation. Despite this intuitive understanding, there exists heterogeneity of definitions in literature. However, the different understandings mainly share some common basic characteristics. For example, Benisch (1973) defines co-operation as "the merging of individual enterprise functions for the purpose of increasing the production capacity of the enterprises involved and thereby to improve their competitive ability." Pleiss & Kreutner (1991) offer one more operational definition with "a collective acting of at least two [ enterprises ], which share individual goals on the basis of coordinated action plans (...)." In a common understanding, co-operation is understood as