Business Innovation in Virtual Enterprise Environments (VEE) can be viewed as a new research subject. For a long time the research on innovation was focusing on companies, especially intra-organisational challenges and questions. Due to the discussion of networks such as supply chains, virtual organisations or collaborative enterprise networks to name a few - the focus is slowly changing towards inter-organisational questions. Consequently the future of industrial production will be dominated by a stronger collaboration between enterprises. Thus, competition will rather take place between rivalling networks than between individual enterprises. This is a challenge for collaborative enterprise networks to develop common approaches for Business Innovation management. Our hypothesis is that distributed innovation management will become a powerful concept to make virtual enterprises more successful. In the following initial thoughts describing both Business Innovation and innovation principles are presented. In a second step an attempt to conceptualise Business Innovation in VEE is discussed. Thirdly a first attempt for document based innovation management is conceptualised. Finally the discussion of the Value Reference Model (VRM) shows initial ideas to identify key performance indicators (KPI) for Business Innovation in VEE. Some conclusions finalise the paper.
