In recent years demand, the competitive environment, and technology have become ever more complex; it is therefore easy to understand why businesses, in their search for competitiveness, have started to create organizational “networks”. 

Business Networks offer an organizational and operational framework which allows the Italian production system to answer the challenge of experienced low cost competitors, capable of developing original skills, to increase quality and innovative knowledge and to compensate for the assumed risks thanks to economic possibilities and to greater achievable profitability.

For the joint pursuit of such objectives, nevertheless, reliance on spontaneous networks that have zero impact on the territory, is not enough. 
It is now clear that there is a demand to exceed district paradigms and paths, to create networks "trans-territorial" and "trans-sectorial", which succeed in exploiting the advantages of specialization, typical of SMEs, with the economies of scale allowed by dimensional growth.

Collaboration among businesses, especially those smaller companies which do not produce their own products, represents one of the principal elements for the increase in the ability to innovate, to compete and to drive the growth of entrepreneurial activities. The process of creating a business network follows three phases: start up, challenge and evolution, each one characterized by different methods of coordination and collaboration.