I understand that the focus is/has been on the personal connections that people have. But my reservation about personal relationships alone is that the impetus to act on these relationships - to develop them into actual institutional connections - is inconsistent.

In the past few months alone, friends/connections have contacted me because they were looking for a job or a way to develop their business and <i>just happened<i> to see my employer on LinkedIn, or incidentally saw that I had a connection-by-degrees with someone at another company they wanted to reach.

These cases tell me that too many connections are purely incidental. I think an objective framework that could capture these potential connections.

That said, what are the typical objective elements of the business-relationship process that can be identified without the need of human proactive declaration of business needs/offerings? What sort of characteristics would you include in an 'institutional profile' that would help other businesses understand the potential for a mutually beneficial connection?