The Collaborative Future

Collaboration has become an important goal in modern ventures, across the spectrum of commercial, social, and intellectual activities, sometimes as a mediating factor, and sometimes as a driving, foundational principle. Research, development, social programs, and ongoing ventures of all sorts benefit from interactions between teams, groups, and organizations, across intellectual disciplines and across facets and features of the inquiry, product, entity, or activity under consideration. We present a survey of the state of collaboration and collaborative enterprise, in the context of papers and presentations at the International Symposium on Collaborative Enterprises 2011 (CENT 2011), and the extended papers appearing in this special issue