Mid Sweden University

To work together in virtual teams has increasingly become a natural change

in how organizations work. Due to demands from the environment,

organizations have had to transform from traditional ways of working to

becoming more flexible and adaptive. The aim of this article is to identify

obstacles, problems, and presumptions in order to enable the virtual team to

be successful. A project — The TIC-project — is described, and results from

a study concerning collaboration and networking among companies within

Technical Communication are presented. Results show that, to a great

extent, experiences from networking are lacking. Furthermore, trust must be

embedded in the teams, meaning that personal meetings must precede

virtual meetings. Most interviewees declared a wish to collaborate despite

being competitors. Finally, questions and topics for further research are

presented.