Title: Identifying and exploiting the collaboration factors inside SMEs networks

Authors: Dario Antonelli; Teresa Taurino

Addresses: Department of Production Systems and Economics, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy. ' Department of Production Systems and Economics, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy

Abstract: Present research introduces a procedure for the analysis of the collaborative behaviour inside industry networks. Collaboration is seen as a collection of factors, each of them boosting competitive advantages to industry networks of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The distinctiveness of the research is that there is not a preliminary choice of the technical and organising factors that contribute to establish any forms of collaboration among the SMEs. As there is a large number of typologies among the industry networks, it has been necessary to highlight the common features and the main interactions with the inside and the outside of the network by building a meta-model of the network organisation. Collaboration factors were extracted applying the non-linear principal components analysis to a large set of data collected by the EU project CODESNET. The extracted collaboration factors become the entries of a modified SWOT analysis. The result of the process is the evaluation of the potential directions of collaboration independent from the specific network type.

Keywords: SMEs; SME networks; SME collaboration; industrial networks; networking; principal component analysis; PCA; SWOT analysis; small and medium-sized enterprises; collaborative behaviour.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2011.043805

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2011 Vol.9 No.4, pp.382 - 402

Published online: 21 Feb 2015 *

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