Creating Competitive Advantage: The Emergence of a New Business through Collaborative Networks – An Empirical Case Study in the ICT Sector

Abstract

This chapter addresses collaborative business networks at the level of industry/cluster networks, which is important and relevant from the strategic management perspective in several industries. This chapter examines two current “hot topics”: the emergence of a new Internet driven business group, and its construction through a series of intentionally developed collaborative networks. Networks are seen to offer firms collective benefits beyond those of a single firm or market transaction. The author of this chapter aims to contribute to the development of the emerging theory of network management by inte-grating notions from the Industrial Network Approach and the Resource-Based View of the firm, in particular its extensions into dynamic capabilities and learning. The starting premise is that the charac-teristics of the task that organizations try to accomplish through forming a specific collaborative net-work influence, the management of that network, and thus, the capabilities developed and required. This chapter is based on a longitudinal case study in the ICT-sector.