'This well-edited volume should be on the shelf of every regional development agency library. Its seventeen chapters written by 31 predominantly academic contributors are divided into four coherent sections: the first on cluster and network modelling, the next on empirical analysis, a third on case studies, finishing with two chapters on policy analysis and strategies.' - Tony Jackson, Journal of Economic Development This book provides a state-of-the-art overview of spatial industrial clusters and inter-firm networks. Given the prevailing political belief that clusters can be a major vehicle for economic development and growth, it is important to have a sound understanding of clusters and how they emerge, grow, eventually stagnate and disappear. It is also vital to know when and how to apply policy measures to support cluster development in order to increase economic welfare. This book illuminates both the theoretical and empirical issues relating to clusters and inter-firm networks, and presents a number of interesting case studies from a variety of different countries.

Interfirm networks include franchising, retail and service chains, cooperatives, financial networks, joint ventures, strategic alliances, licensing, public-private partnerships and new network forms in the digital economy. This book gathers the latest research studies that approach these networks – and the creation of innovation under the conditions of a complex, dynamic, knowledge-intensive and digital economy – from an interdisciplinary perspective. The studies, all of which were written by respected experts, explore how firms can improve their competitiveness by securing access to innovation, knowledge, complementary resources and capabilities otherwise not available to them. In addition, they highlight how, driven by an unpredictable environment, firms embedded in inter-organizational networks are increasingly transforming from co-operators to collaborators and valuable co-creators of innovation.

This insightful book presents a legal and economic analysis of inter-firm cooperation through networks as an alternative to vertical integration. It examines comparatively various forms of collaboration, ranging from consortia to multiparty joint ventures and from franchising to dealerships. Collaboration among firms of different sizes helps to overcome numerousweaknesses of the modern western industrial systems. It permits the governing of vertical disintegration without increasing fragmentation and transaction costs and allows firms to benefit from resource complementarities, favoring division of labour. The contributing authors, primarily focusing on Europe and the US, address important ways in which legal systems provide a framework for inter-firm coordination. It is clear from the analysis that significant obstacles to collaboration still remain, and the authors call for legal reforms at European and Member States level.

This book examines the inter-firm networks created by interlock coordination through shared directors (inter-board) and managers (inter-department) at various levels: whole aggregate, core vs. peripheral companies, and distribution by country and sector. Presenting an empirical case study on all the limited liability or stock companies of the aerospace industry in the European Union and its interlock partners worldwide, the authors shed new light on these forms of coordination. Moreover, they reveal the relevance of shared managers’ coordination and hybrid manager-director interlocks. The book applies advanced statistical and social network analysis alike by combining firms’ attributes (e.g. standard economic-financial parameters) and topological indices for firms (e.g. centrality and cluster measures). By conducting the analysis at both the aggregate network level and the cluster or corporate group level, the authors show how extensive and intensive the interlock forms of coordination are, especially when dealing with shared managers. By testing seven hypotheses concerning the research stream on board interlocks and (more broadly) inter-firm networks, the study offers new insights into the role of the financial sector, on the relations between interlock coordination and firms’ performance, on the role of geographical, technological and organizational proximity, and on the relations between interlock coordination and firms’ size. As such, this book will appeal to scholars of organization studies, business and management studies, industrial and evolutionary economics, and economic sociology, as well as officers and policymakers at anti-trust regulation institutions.

This book is one of the first comprehensive works to fill the knowledge gap resulting from the limited number of empirical studies on interfirm networks. The in-depth empirical research presented here is based on a massive transaction relationship database of approximately 400,000 Japanese firms. This volume, unlike others, focuses on the role of interfirm networks in three different fields: (1) macroeconomic activities, (2) economic geography and firm dynamics, and (3) firm–bank relationships. The database for this work is constructed in collaboration with Japan's largest credit research company, Teikoku Data Bank, and covers a substantial portion of Japanese firms with information on firms' transaction partners, shareholders, financial institutions, and other attributes, including their locations and performance. Networks prevail in many aspects of economic activities and play a major role in explaining a wide variety of economic phenomena from business cycles to knowledge spillovers, which has motivated economists to produce a number of excellent works. In the policy arena, there has been a growing concern on the vulnerabilities of networks based on the casual observation that idiosyncratic shocks on firms can be amplified through inter-firm connections and leads to a systemic crisis. Typical examples are the manufacturing supply-chain networks in the automobile and electronics industries which propagated regionally concentrated shocks (the Great East Japan Earthquake and floods in Thailand in 2011) into global ones. An abundance of theoretical literature on the formation and functions of networks is available already. This book breaks new ground, however, and provides an excellent opportunity for the reader to gain a more integrated understanding of the role of networks in the economy. The Economics of Interfirm Networks will be of special interest to economists and practitioners seeking empirical and quantitative knowledge on interfirm and firm–bank networks.

Developments in technology and globalisation have led to an upsurge in inter-organizational relations. This book surveys the current field, connects differing perspectives and answers questions about who should collaborate, why, and how.

Provides in-depth understanding about business-to-business (B2B) and organizational relationships. This title includes descriptions on how B2B networks form, function and develop and is for readers who want to delve into how B2B relationships actually work and, frequently, do not work.