Consortium

Educational in its early October evening glory in Pori, Finland Consortiums among universities are established to share research laboratories and equipment facilities, exchange faculty and students, provide programs abroad, and form specialized research centers and admissions offices. Generally, it includes a corporate identity, voluntary membership of institutions, its own staff and budgetary autonomy. This arrangement led to inefficiencies due to the inherent conflicts of interest that the four partner companies faced; they were both shareholders of, and subcontractors to, the consortium. The companies collaborated on development of the Airbus range, but guarded the financial details of their own production activities and sought to maximize the transfer prices of their sub-assemblies. In 2001, EADS (created by the merger of French, German and Spanish Airbus partner companies) and BAE Systems (the British partner company) transferred their Airbus production assets to a new company, Airbus SAS. In return, they got 80% and 20% shares respectively. BAE would later sell its share to EADS. Coopetition Coopetition, deriving from a portmanteau of cooperation and competition, is the word used when companies that are otherwise competitors collaborate in a consortium to cooperate on areas non-strategic for their core businesses. They prefer to reduce their costs on these non-strategic areas and compete on other areas where they can differentiate better. For example, the GENIVI Alliance, now called COVESA, is a not-for-profit consortium between different car makers in order to ease building an In-Vehicle Infotainment system. Another example is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is a consortium that standardizes web technologies like HTML, XML and CSS. Government, academia and industry The Institute for Food Safety and Health is a consortium consisting of the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and members of the food industry. Some of the work done at the institute includes, "assessment and validation of new and novel food safety and preservation technologies, processing and packaging systems, microbiological and chemical methods, health promoting food components, and risk management strategies". Consortium for installment-based purchases Commonly known in the United States as a rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) and also called Savings Clubs, Christmas clubs, sousou or even money circles, they are typically informal associations of people saving money together with a commonly shared goal: buying something with the same value. In this association its members contribute by paying equal amount installments (usually monthly or weekly) towards a common fund. On every installment the common fund reaches the goal value and someone is awarded this sum and from this point forward this person own the association the remaining amount, just as in a loan. This process repeats until every member is awarded the entire sum. These informal associations are specially popular among immigrants since they are a cheaper alternative to traditional financing and usually require no formal papers, credit history or even a bank account. Outside the United States, these savings clubs can be formal and have proper legislation. In some countries, like Brazil, consórcios are an integral part of the traditional banking system, where there are clubs for purchasing real estate and cars, and even for plastic surgery costs. Over seven million people have engaged in these formal savings associations over the past years, adding to over U$10 billion in credit. Since these clubs have up to thousands of members, products purchased are awarded through lottery and bidding processes and the common fund administrators charge a fixed fee in order to take responsibility and guarantee the integrity of the process. ==Legal nature of the consortium agreement in selected countries==