A managerial approach to firms’ networking strategy

As recently pointed out by many authors and companies‟ manager, the company competitiveness is more and more based on the ability of a firm to build strategic and competitive networks with partners and competitors. Nowadays, in a competitive environment, firms are facing challenges such as the growing demand of innovation, the increasing competitiveness and the need to penetrate new markets, by using network strategies. Consequently, such motivations are putting an increasing interest on networking strategy issue, which are becoming an essential strength of company competitive strategy. In this work the most significant theories on firm networking are reviewed and an innovative strategic perspective that underlies a firm network strategy is proposed. Indeed, we have argued that networks are differently organized according to three basic strategic objectives: gaining efficiency, collecting knowledge, and pursuing globalization. Furthermore, different forms of governance support such networks. In the paper, an empirical research, conducted on a secondary data set consisting of a sample of 115 real case studies, was conducted to confirm such hypothesis. The result of the empirical analysis seems to confirm our hypothesis.