Using the Internet for Collaborative Research in Europe – Experiences from the GARNET Virtual Network Jan vom Brocke, Kai Riemer, Stefan Große-Böckmann, Daniel Richter Management Summary Collaboration is a key element in European research. In particular, networks of excellence serve to bring together experts from various member states in order to foster research in a particular field of science. An essential part of these networks is taking place virtually by means of internet support, such as e-mail, voice mail and forums. There is no doubt that technology serves as an enabler for EU research and that great achievements have been gained so far. However, there is still a remarkable gap between collaboration in theory and research collaboration in practice. In fact, people collaborate to a certain extent and yet, little coherence is reached when it comes to pooling information, finding peers, sharing documents, or jointly working on research papers. For that purpose, collaboration platforms have been developed, which differ in quality but still offer a rather homogeneous set of features supporting the above named tasks. Experience fro m information system research during the past decades shows that making use of information systems is not just a technical issue. Hence, in the context of the GARNET network, great emphasis has been put on the involvement of people from the outset. This has included interviews, on-site-visits and workshops for identifying the specific demands of the network members, to name but a few. Finalising the development phase, a detailed study on the actual usage of the network has been carried out which is documented in this paper for the purpose of learning how to improve the usage of the VN in the future. The results of the study provide evidence of the academic evaluation that setting up a virtual network does not follow “routine design”. On the contrary, a considerable number of research